Description

Angle-of-Arrival estimates the bearing(s) of incoming RF energy from inter-antenna phase differences across an array. Subspace methods like MUSIC and ESPRIT dominate the high-resolution end; matched-filter / beamforming covers the low-resolution end. AoA is one of the few CSI features that gives spatial information without requiring multiple anchors and is therefore central to single-AP indoor sensing.

When it's used

  • Single-AP device-free-localization pipelines
  • Direction-of-motion estimation in crowd-flow analysis
  • Multi-target separation in CSI sensing
  • ISAC sensing observations

Limitations

  • Resolution bounded by array aperture (small Wi-Fi arrays = poor angular resolution)
  • Multipath ghost peaks in MUSIC pseudospectra
  • Calibration of antenna geometry / per-antenna phase is required

Source Papers

  • xiong2023_e6c6 — AoA in ISAC sensing analysis
  • liu2022_0883 — AoA in MIMO ISAC
  • soumya2023_9b9f — AoA-based localisation
  • chen2023_5cbd — AoA in CSI generalisation taxonomy

12 vault papers use this method

Titles and DOIs only — no abstracts, no analyses.

  • WiFi Sensing with Channel State Information 2020 DOI ↗
  • A Survey on Human Behavior Recognition Using Channel State Information 2019 DOI ↗
  • Cross-Domain WiFi Sensing with Channel State Information: A Survey 2023 DOI ↗
  • Integrated Sensing and Communications: Toward Dual-Functional Wireless Networks for 6G and Beyond 2022 DOI ↗
  • On CSI and Passive Wi-Fi Radar for Opportunistic Physical Activity Recognition 2022 DOI ↗
  • Free Your CSI 2019 DOI ↗
  • A Survey on Wi-Fi Sensing Generalizability: Taxonomy, Techniques, Datasets, and Future Research Prospects 2026 DOI ↗
  • WiFi-Based Human Sensing With Deep Learning: Recent Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities 2024 DOI ↗
  • A Survey on Fusion-Based Indoor Positioning 2020 DOI ↗
  • On the Fundamental Tradeoff of Integrated Sensing and Communications Under Gaussian Channels 2023 DOI ↗
  • BLE Can See: A Reinforcement Learning Approach for RF-based Indoor Occupancy Detection 2021 DOI ↗
  • Channel State Information from Pure Communication to Sense and Track Human Motion: A Survey 2019 DOI ↗