VersaBeam: Versatile Beamforming for Integrated Sensing and Communication over Commodity Wi-Fi

Reusing Wi-Fi communication packets for sensing purpose has been regarded as one of the most cost-effective ways to realize integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) on commodity Wi-Fi, However, the channel state information (CSI) measured from these packets can be heavily compromised by modern Wi-Fi beamforming protocols tailored primarily to maximize communication throughput, hence inadvertently affecting Wi-Fi sensing performance. To this end, we propose VersaBeam, a practical ISAC system actively leveraging beamforming to simultaneously achieve high-performance communication and sensing in commodity Wi-Fi, Instead of attempting to mitigate beamforming's negative impact on sensing, VersaBeam boasts a novel beamforming design to balance the demands of both sensing and communication. Additionally, we propose a user selection strategy to determine the sources for packet reuse and introduce a method to unify CSI measured from different users' packets, accommodating variations in beamforming direction. We implement a prototype of VersaBeam on commodity Wi-Fi devices and further demonstrate its efficacy through micro-benchmarking and practical experiments in gesture recognition.