VesperCSI improves Wi-Fi sensing data capture on edge devices
VesperCSI: A High-Performance and Extensible CSI Acquisition Framework for Edge Wi-Fi Sensing
Networking and Internet ArchitecturePerformance
Summary
Wi-Fi signals carry detailed information about how they travel around devices and spaces, useful for detecting activities or locations without needing to carry devices. The authors developed VesperCSI, a new software tool that collects this Wi-Fi channel data faster and more reliably on common small computers than older tools. Their tests show VesperCSI keeps almost all data frames at very high speeds, while the older tool loses more than half. This makes VesperCSI a better base for real-time Wi-Fi sensing applications on edge devices.
What this means in practice
- •For edge device engineers: Build Wi-Fi sensing systems that rely on high-rate, low-loss channel data collection on small Linux-based devices.
- •For smart home technology developers: Create reliable occupancy detection or activity monitoring solutions using Wi-Fi signals captured by affordable edge hardware.
Authors
Kaan Baydemir, Sajjad Baghaee, Ilkay Ulusoy
Abstract
Channel State Information (CSI) captures fine-grained changes in Wi-Fi channel propagation and provides a foundation for device-free sensing applications such as activity recognition, localization, and occupancy detection. The development of such applications depends on an acquisition system that can handle high-rate CSI streams while remaining extensible to the requirements of individual experiments. VesperCSI is an open-source, GPL-3.0-licensed redesign of FeitCSI for CSI acquisition with Intel AX200 and AX210 Wi-Fi interfaces. It targets high-rate acquisition on amd64 and aarch64 Linux hosts using fixed-capacity preallocated object pools and separate capture and consumer threads. A loadable plugin interface supports experiment-specific monitoring, storage, and processing. We evaluate VesperCSI and FeitCSI on Raspberry Pi CM4 receivers in a burst-traffic software crossover. At a 600-MHz all-core frequency ceiling and a target rate of 2500 frames/s, VesperCSI achieves mean sequence retention of 99.017-99.087% in 10,000-frame bursts, compared with 43.972-46.553% for FeitCSI. This ordering persists after exchanging the userspace programs between two receivers while retaining their respective drivers. The comparison therefore characterizes the tested software-and-driver packages rather than isolating userspace effects. These results support VesperCSI as a reusable acquisition component for edge-hosted Wi-Fi sensing under the evaluated workload and platform conditions.