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

• Taehyeon Kim,

Vol. 20, No. 3, March 31, 2026
10.3837/tiis.2026.03.008, Download Paper (Free):

• Channel state information
• Commodity Hardware
• Distributed Sensing
• Human Activity Recognition
• Indoor Localization
• WiFi Sensing

Abstract

WiFi Channel State Information (CSI)-based sensing is a pivotal technology for device-free ambient intelligence. However, its practical adoption has been hindered by a heavy reliance on specialized hardware and computationally prohibitive models. This paper addresses these challenges by introducing CSI-Chain, a complete, open-source, and end-to-end framework designed for commodity ESP32 microcontrollers. CSI-Chain integrates a robust real-time preprocessing pipeline with high-performance inference to achieve state-of-the-art results in unified Human Activity Recognition (HAR) and indoor localization. Our contributions are fourfold: (1) A Complete & Reproducible Pipeline: We present the first fully integrated CSI sensing framework built exclusively on low-cost commodity hardware, fundamentally lowering the barrier to entry for practical deployment. (2) LiteCSINet: We present an efficient, purpose-built CNN architecture that achieves competitive performance with larger transformer-based models while using only one-third of the parameters, demonstrating that a well-designed lightweight model, when paired with robust preprocessing, can match heavyweight approaches. (3) Unified Multi-Task Learning: The framework effectively unifies HAR and zone-based localization within a single model, achieving high accuracies of 95.8% and 98.5%, respectively. (4) Cross-Environment Validation: We rigorously evaluate the system’s robustness through cross-environment testing, proving its generalization capabilities a critical yet often overlooked requirement for real-world applications. CSI-Chain provides a viable blueprint for scalable and privacy-preserving smart environments, proving that high-performance sensing is achievable without expensive specialized hardware.

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