Same Signal, Different Story: Demystifying Receiver Effects in Wi-Fi Channel State Information

Abstract

Wi-Fi sensing has emerged as a versatile tool for tasks such as localization, gesture recognition, and vital-sign monitoring, enabling applications from smart environments to personalized healthcare. However, sensing accuracy often significantly degrades when pretrained models are deployed across different commodity receivers. We present the first systematic comparison of Channel State Information (CSI) across diverse Commercial Off-The-Shelf Wi-Fi sensing platforms. Using a unified experimental setup delivering precisely precoded signals simultaneously to multiple receivers, we isolate receiver-specific variability. We find that dominant cross-device differences arise from Automatic Gain Control and consistent subcarrier nonlinearities. We propose a simple gain-alignment preprocessing step, recovering most of the lost accuracy (up to 75%) in cross-device Human Activity Recognition model deployments. Without preprocessing, model accuracy sharply drops-effectively breaking practical deployments. Additional analyses reveal measurable inherent differences in receiver faithfulness, sensitivity and noise. While these receiver-induced differences do not significantly affect robust sensing tasks such as Human Activity Recognition, they become relevant in scenarios demanding high precision (e.g., single-shot time of flight). Our findings demonstrate that cross-device variability in CSI is real but manageable, and we provide tools and guidelines for robust, hardware-agnostic Wi-Fi sensing.