Wi-BFI: Extracting the IEEE 802.11 Beamforming Feedback Information from Commercial Wi-Fi Devices

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Haque, Khandaker Foysal, Meneghello, Francesca, Restuccia, Francesco
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Haque, Khandaker Foysal
Meneghello, Francesca
Restuccia, Francesco
author_facet Haque, Khandaker Foysal
Meneghello, Francesca
Restuccia, Francesco
contents Recently, researchers have shown that the beamforming feedback angles (BFAs) used for Wi-Fi multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) operations can be effectively leveraged as a proxy of the channel frequency response (CFR) for different purposes. Examples are passive human activity recognition and device fingerprinting. However, even though the BFAs report frames are sent in clear text, there is not yet a unified open-source tool to extract and decode the BFAs from the frames. To fill this gap, we developed Wi-BFI, the first tool that allows retrieving Wi-Fi BFAs and reconstructing the beamforming feedback information (BFI) - a compressed representation of the CFR - from the BFAs frames captured over the air. The tool supports BFAs extraction within both IEEE 802.11ac and 802.11ax networks operating on radio channels with 160/80/40/20 MHz bandwidth. Both multi-user and single-user MIMO feedback can be decoded through Wi-BFI. The tool supports real-time and offline extraction and storage of BFAs and BFI. The real-time mode also includes a visual representation of the channel state that continuously updates based on the collected data. Wi-BFI code is open source and the tool is also available as a pip package.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_04408
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Wi-BFI: Extracting the IEEE 802.11 Beamforming Feedback Information from Commercial Wi-Fi Devices
Haque, Khandaker Foysal
Meneghello, Francesca
Restuccia, Francesco
Networking and Internet Architecture
Signal Processing
Recently, researchers have shown that the beamforming feedback angles (BFAs) used for Wi-Fi multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) operations can be effectively leveraged as a proxy of the channel frequency response (CFR) for different purposes. Examples are passive human activity recognition and device fingerprinting. However, even though the BFAs report frames are sent in clear text, there is not yet a unified open-source tool to extract and decode the BFAs from the frames. To fill this gap, we developed Wi-BFI, the first tool that allows retrieving Wi-Fi BFAs and reconstructing the beamforming feedback information (BFI) - a compressed representation of the CFR - from the BFAs frames captured over the air. The tool supports BFAs extraction within both IEEE 802.11ac and 802.11ax networks operating on radio channels with 160/80/40/20 MHz bandwidth. Both multi-user and single-user MIMO feedback can be decoded through Wi-BFI. The tool supports real-time and offline extraction and storage of BFAs and BFI. The real-time mode also includes a visual representation of the channel state that continuously updates based on the collected data. Wi-BFI code is open source and the tool is also available as a pip package.
title Wi-BFI: Extracting the IEEE 802.11 Beamforming Feedback Information from Commercial Wi-Fi Devices
topic Networking and Internet Architecture
Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.04408