Understanding the Diffraction Model in Static Multipath-Rich Environments for WiFi Sensing System Design

Although WiFi-based contactless sensing has made significant progress in the past decade, most prior work still focus on the reflection zone far from WiFi transceivers, while few studies explore the diffraction zone near transceivers. Additionally, previous diffraction models only consider the CSI amplitude signal and ignore the impact of multipath. In this work, we develop an accurate diffraction model to characterize the relationship between both CSI amplitude and phase and target's movement in the diffraction zone. We further put forward the deformation forms of the model under static multipath conditions and find that the CSI patterns vary significantly with multipath. Consequently, the common assumption of a one-to-one mapping between CSI patterns and activities in existing work fails due to multipaths, degrading sensing performance when multipath changes. To address this challenge, we propose to extract a relative change pattern from CSI signals to recover the one-to-one mapping relations and eliminate the impact of static multipath. Extensive experiments under various multipath conditions demonstrate an accuracy higher than 96% for the coarse-grained intrusion detection and an average error rate of 0.6 bpm for the fine-grained respiration monitoring.