rssi-fingerprinting — monad-knowledge

Description

RSSI is a scalar per-packet receive-power measurement, available on every Wi-Fi and BLE device. RSSI fingerprinting builds an offline radio map of (location, RSSI vector) pairs and matches online queries against it. It is the legacy indoor-positioning workhorse and the BLE side of the thesis's calibration pipeline — BLE RSSI / advertisements give cheap, ubiquitous trajectory information against which CSI is anchored.

When it's used

BLE-derived trajectories that anchor CSI calibration
Coarse indoor positioning where CSI is unavailable
Multi-anchor multilateration / trilateration

Limitations

Highly noisy due to body shadowing, multipath, and orientation
Coarse spatial granularity (metres, not centimetres)
Database goes stale on environment change

Source Papers

sadowski2020_f2ba ↗ — RSSI fingerprinting comparative
guo2020_267f ↗ — RSSI in indoor-positioning fusion
zhen2022_bb0b ↗ — RSSI-based positioning study
ojagh2020_321f ↗ — RSSI fingerprint refinement

26 vault papers use this method

Titles and DOIs only — no abstracts, no analyses.

Device-free occupancy detection and crowd counting in smart buildings with WiFi-enabled IoT 2018 DOI ↗

Wi-CaL: WiFi Sensing and Machine Learning Based Device-Free Crowd Counting and Localization 2022 DOI ↗

Predictable 802.11 packet delivery from wireless channel measurements 2010 DOI ↗

A Survey on Human Behavior Recognition Using Channel State Information 2019 DOI ↗

A Novel Device-Free Counting Method Based on Channel Status Information 2018 DOI ↗

Human Sensing by Using Radio Frequency Signals: A Survey on Occupancy and Activity Detection 2023 DOI ↗

A Survey on Wi-Fi Sensing Generalizability: Taxonomy, Techniques, Datasets, and Future Research Prospects 2026 DOI ↗

WiFi CSI-based device-free sensing: from Fresnel zone model to CSI-ratio model 2022 DOI ↗

WiFi-Based Human Sensing With Deep Learning: Recent Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities 2024 DOI ↗

A Survey on Fusion-Based Indoor Positioning 2020 DOI ↗

Device-Free Passive Identity Identification via WiFi Signals 2017 DOI ↗

A Survey on Green Wireless Sensing: Energy-Efficient Sensing via WiFi CSI and Lightweight Learning 2026 DOI ↗

CSI-Chain: A Complete End-to-End Framework for WiFi CSI Sensing 2026 DOI ↗

IoT solutions for e-Health applications for care's continuity at home 2026 DOI ↗

Time matters: Empirical insights into the limits and challenges of temporal generalization in CSI-based Wi-Fi sensing 2025 DOI ↗

Device-Free Wireless Sensing for Gesture Recognition Based on Complementary CSI Amplitude and Phase 2024 DOI ↗

PEOPLEx: PEdestrian Opportunistic Positioning LEveraging IMU, UWB, BLE and WiFi 2024 DOI ↗

A Framework to Estimate Classroom Occupancy using WiFi Channel State Information 2023 DOI ↗

Nationwide deployment and operation of a virtual arrival detection system in the wild 2021 DOI ↗

BLE Can See: A Reinforcement Learning Approach for RF-based Indoor Occupancy Detection 2021 DOI ↗

A Person-to-Person and Person-to-Place COVID-19 Contact Tracing System Based on OGC IndoorGML 2020 DOI ↗

Memoryless Techniques and Wireless Technologies for Indoor Localization With the Internet of Things 2020 DOI ↗

A Privacy-Aware Crowd Management System for Smart Cities and Smart Buildings 2020 DOI ↗

Channel State Information from Pure Communication to Sense and Track Human Motion: A Survey 2019 DOI ↗

Dataset for Device-Free Wireless Sensing of Crowd Size in Public Transportation Environments 2026 DOI ↗

Device-Free Crowd Size Estimation Using Wireless Sensing on Subway Platforms 2024 DOI ↗