Towards Motion-Aware Wireless LANs Using PHY Layer Information

The increasing popularity of WiFi brings new challenges in the design of wireless protocols but at the same time creates exciting opportunities for novel ways of exploiting WiFi technology in a variety of applications. On one hand, the smaller form factor of today´s WiFi devices allows WiFi users to access wireless networks under mobility, calling for new, mobility-aware wireless protocols that are able to sustain high performance, on the other hand, the ubiquity of WiFi devices has recently raised interest in extending WiFi´s capabilities beyond communication, e.g., for human-computer interaction. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is possible to enable fine-grained human motion detection on commodity WiFi devices by exploiting PHY layer information exposed by today´s WiFi chipsets. We propose two motion detection techniques for two different application scenarios and explore their benefits on protocol performance and human-device interaction, respectively.