Welcome to the new world!
We are so proud to announce that through the support of the Intel Wi-Fi 6E AX210 (AX210) commercial Wi-Fi NIC, the PicoScenes platform is the first (and currently the only) platform that provides CSI measurements in the 6 GHz band!
Wi-Fi sensing has been suffering from a narrow and discontinuous spectrum since its very beginning, and the availability of the 6 GHz band will eliminate this problem. The AX210 card supports a total of 1.18 GHz of the continuously available spectrum from 5955 MHz to 7115 MHz, which is 14.7x more than the available spectrum in the 2.4 GHz band and 2.5 times more than the total spectrum in the 5 GHz band.
What are the advantages of the 6GHz band?
Three main advantages of using the AX210 NIC for sensing experiments in the 6GHz band:
Millimeter-level sensing can be expected! The 6GHz band provides 1.18GHz continuously available spectrum. With the spectrum stitching technique, researchers can obtain a temporal-spatial resolution of over 1GHz, i.e. a temporal resolution of 1ns or a spatial resolution of 30cm. Together with the sampling resolution of the 16-bit ADC, Wi-Fi sensing will support millimeter-level sensing from the principle for the first time.
802.11ax + 160 MHz bandwidth CSI measurement! The AX210 is the next-gen of AX200 NIC with dedicated support for the 6GHz band. For AX200, PicoScenes already provides 11ax protocol 160MHz bandwidth 2×2 MIMO CSI measurements with up to 1992x2x2 subcarriers! Wi-Fi sensing enters the 11ax + 6GHz era!
Interference-free measurement! It is well known that environmental noise and interference from non-cooperative devices are the deep pits of Wi-Fi sensing research. While the 6GHz spectrum is only available in selected areas and is just entering commercial use with very few devices available. As a result, Wi-Fi sensing in the 6GH band will enjoy pure interference-free measurement.
How to perform experiments without a 6GHz Wi-Fi router?
No worries, the PicoScenes platform provides the powerful Packet Injection capability with the support of all-protocol (11a/g/n/ac/ax), all-broadband (20/40/80/160 MHz) and all-coding (BCC/LDPC). With the PicoScenes platform, only two NICs, i.e., one transmitter and one receiver, are needed to perform Wi-Fi sensing in the 6 GHz band!
What is PicoScenes?
The PicoScenes platform is a Wi-Fi sensing middleware developed by Dr. Zhiping Jiang and Prof. Rui Li’s team at Xidian University, China. It attempts to solve two problems troubling Wi-Fi sensing for a long time: insufficient hardware features and inadequate measurement software.
In the hardware aspect: it supports the extraction of CSI information from a wide range of commercial Wi-Fi sensing hardware (AX210/AX200/9300/5300) and is the first work to support the extraction of 11ax protocol CSI measurements. Based on a high-performance Wi-Fi baseband implantation with all-protocol, all-broadband, all-encoding supports, PicoScenes is also the first platform that can seamlessly convert USRP devices into CSI measurement hardware with complete access to the PHY layer information.
In the software aspect: PicoScenes is currently the only platform that supports simultaneous CSI measurements from multiple NICs (or USRPs), and the PicoScenes system adopts a “driver + platform + plug-in” architecture that allows users to quickly implement complex, real-time, interactive CSI measurement processes through the plug-in mechanism.
Where to download? How to use it?
We provide the most detailed documentation in the Wi-Fi sensing research area at https://ps.zpj.io, and you are welcome to try it out!