Enhancing WiFi CSI Fingerprinting: A Deep Auxiliary Learning Approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Huang, Yong, Wang, Wenjing, Zhang, Dalong, Wang, Junjie, Chen, Chen, Cao, Yan, Wang, Wei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Huang, Yong
Wang, Wenjing
Zhang, Dalong
Wang, Junjie
Chen, Chen
Cao, Yan
Wang, Wei
author_facet Huang, Yong
Wang, Wenjing
Zhang, Dalong
Wang, Junjie
Chen, Chen
Cao, Yan
Wang, Wei
contents Radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting techniques provide a promising supplement to cryptography-based approaches but rely on dedicated equipment to capture in-phase and quadrature (IQ) samples, hindering their wide adoption. Recent advances advocate easily obtainable channel state information (CSI) by commercial WiFi devices for lightweight RF fingerprinting, while falling short in addressing the challenges of coarse granularity of CSI measurements in an open-world setting. In this paper, we propose CSI2Q, a novel CSI fingerprinting system that achieves comparable performance to IQ-based approaches. Instead of extracting fingerprints directly from raw CSI measurements, CSI2Q first transforms frequency-domain CSI measurements into time-domain signals that share the same feature space with IQ samples. Then, we employ a deep auxiliary learning strategy to transfer useful knowledge from an IQ fingerprinting model to the CSI counterpart. Finally, the trained CSI model is combined with an OpenMax function to estimate the likelihood of unknown ones. We evaluate CSI2Q on one synthetic CSI dataset involving 85 devices and two real CSI datasets, including 10 and 25 WiFi routers, respectively. Our system achieves accuracy increases of at least 16% on the synthetic CSI dataset, 20% on the in-lab CSI dataset, and 17% on the in-the-wild CSI dataset.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22731
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Enhancing WiFi CSI Fingerprinting: A Deep Auxiliary Learning Approach
Huang, Yong
Wang, Wenjing
Zhang, Dalong
Wang, Junjie
Chen, Chen
Cao, Yan
Wang, Wei
Signal Processing
Radio frequency (RF) fingerprinting techniques provide a promising supplement to cryptography-based approaches but rely on dedicated equipment to capture in-phase and quadrature (IQ) samples, hindering their wide adoption. Recent advances advocate easily obtainable channel state information (CSI) by commercial WiFi devices for lightweight RF fingerprinting, while falling short in addressing the challenges of coarse granularity of CSI measurements in an open-world setting. In this paper, we propose CSI2Q, a novel CSI fingerprinting system that achieves comparable performance to IQ-based approaches. Instead of extracting fingerprints directly from raw CSI measurements, CSI2Q first transforms frequency-domain CSI measurements into time-domain signals that share the same feature space with IQ samples. Then, we employ a deep auxiliary learning strategy to transfer useful knowledge from an IQ fingerprinting model to the CSI counterpart. Finally, the trained CSI model is combined with an OpenMax function to estimate the likelihood of unknown ones. We evaluate CSI2Q on one synthetic CSI dataset involving 85 devices and two real CSI datasets, including 10 and 25 WiFi routers, respectively. Our system achieves accuracy increases of at least 16% on the synthetic CSI dataset, 20% on the in-lab CSI dataset, and 17% on the in-the-wild CSI dataset.
title Enhancing WiFi CSI Fingerprinting: A Deep Auxiliary Learning Approach
topic Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22731