Linux 802.11n CSI Tool

Overview | Publications | Users | Credits
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Overview

Picture of IWL5300 wireless NIC
An Intel 5300 NIC

This webpage contains instructions to use our 802.11n measurement and experimentation platform. The CSI Tool is built on the Intel Wi-Fi Wireless Link 5300 802.11n MIMO radios, using a custom modified firmware and open source Linux wireless drivers. We include all the software and scripts needed to run experiments, and to read and parse the channel measurements.

The IWL5300 provides 802.11n channel state information in a format that reports the channel matrices for 30 subcarrier groups, which is about one group for every 2 subcarriers at 20 MHz or one in 4 at 40 MHz. Each channel matrix entry is a complex number, with signed 8-bit resolution each for the real and imaginary parts. It specifies the gain and phase of the signal path between a single transmit-receive antenna pair.

There is more information in our tool release announcement below.

Channel state information for four 1x1 links
Example CSI for 4 SISO links

Publications

Users

More than our own work, we are excited about others using our platform to advance the state of the art. We used to maintain a list of 1000+ published papers using our tools and data, but at this point Google Scholar does a fine job for us, despite the dozens of authors that did not bother citing our tools.

Credits

Authors: Daniel Halperin | Wenjun Hu | Anmol Sheth | David Wetherall
Maintainers: Daniel Halperin | David Ward

To cite this tool, the best reference is the CCR 2011 paper (BibTeX).