Description

WiFi sensing is the umbrella term for inferring properties of the physical environment — presence, motion, identity, vital signs — from radio measurements taken on commodity Wi-Fi infrastructure. It contains both RSSI-based methods and the much richer CSI-based methods, and explicitly excludes systems that require dedicated radar hardware. The active corpus of this thesis treats WiFi sensing as the parent category; specific child methods (wifi-csi-sensing, device-free-localization, gesture-recognition, etc.) inherit from it.

When it's used

  • Position papers, surveys, and broad framing claims
  • Cross-cutting discussions of generalisation, domain shift, datasets
  • Bridge between communication-layer and sensing-layer literature

Limitations

  • Term is overloaded — some authors mean RSSI-only, others CSI-only
  • Standardisation lags far behind research practice (until 802.11bf)

Source Papers

  • wang2026_2758 — recent WiFi-sensing pipeline
  • koo2026_a08d — WiFi sensing with attention/Transformer
  • ropitault2024_d49d — WiFi sensing in standards context (802.11bf)
  • chen2023_5cbd — WiFi-sensing generalisation taxonomy
  • barahimi2024_b62c — self-supervised WiFi sensing

25 vault papers use this method

Titles and DOIs only — no abstracts, no analyses.

  • WiFi Sensing with Channel State Information 2020 DOI ↗
  • Wi-CaL: WiFi Sensing and Machine Learning Based Device-Free Crowd Counting and Localization 2022 DOI ↗
  • Integrated Sensing and Communications: Toward Dual-Functional Wireless Networks for 6G and Beyond 2022 DOI ↗
  • Channel State Information (CSI) Amplitude Coloring Scheme for Enhancing Accuracy of an Indoor Occupancy Detection System Using Wi-Fi Sensing 2024 DOI ↗
  • Towards Energy Efficient Wireless Sensing by Leveraging Ambient Wi-Fi Traffic 2024 DOI ↗
  • MUSE-Fi: Contactless MUti-person SEnsing Exploiting Near-field Wi-Fi Channel Variation 2023 DOI ↗
  • Fundamentals, Algorithms, and Technologies of Occupancy Detection for Smart Buildings Using IoT Sensors 2024 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 ↗
  • Simulating Crowds in Real Time with Agent-Based Modelling and a Particle Filter 2020 DOI ↗
  • CrossSense: Towards Cross-Site and Large-Scale WiFi Sensing 2018 DOI ↗
  • WiFi-Based Human Sensing With Deep Learning: Recent Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities 2024 DOI ↗
  • <i>STRmt</i>: A state transition based model for real‐time crowd counting in a metro system 2024 DOI ↗
  • SimHumalator: An Open-Source End-to-End Radar Simulator for Human Activity Recognition 2022 DOI ↗
  • IEEE 802.11bf WLAN Sensing Procedure: Enabling the Widespread Adoption of WiFi Sensing 2024 DOI ↗
  • A Survey on Green Wireless Sensing: Energy-Efficient Sensing via WiFi CSI and Lightweight Learning 2026 DOI ↗
  • MetAegis: Defend Against Physical-layer Wireless Sensing Leakage via Metasurface Obfuscation 2026 DOI ↗
  • CSI-Based NTC Using Ambient WiFi: Channel Selection, Topology Control and Traffic Interference 2026 DOI ↗
  • An Overview on IEEE 802.11bf: WLAN Sensing 2025 DOI ↗
  • CSI-based Passenger Counting on Public Transport Vehicles with Multiple Transceivers 2024 DOI ↗
  • Occupancy Prediction in IoT-Enabled Smart Buildings: Technologies, Methods, and Future Directions 2024 DOI ↗
  • A Framework to Estimate Classroom Occupancy using WiFi Channel State Information 2023 DOI ↗
  • Estimating indoor crowd density and movement behavior using WiFi sensing 2022 DOI ↗
  • BLE Can See: A Reinforcement Learning Approach for RF-based Indoor Occupancy Detection 2021 DOI ↗
  • A Survey of Techniques for Automatically Sensing the Behavior of a Crowd 2019 DOI ↗