Rethinking RSSI for WiFi Sensing

The Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) is widely available on commodity WiFi devices but is commonly regarded as too coarse for fine-grained sensing. This paper revisits its sensing potential and presents WiRSSI, a bistatic WiFi sensing framework for passive human tracking using only RSSI measurements. WiRSSI adopts a 1Tx-3Rx configuration and is readily extensible to Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) deployments. We first reveal how CSI power implicitly encodes phase-related information and how this relationship carries over to RSSI, showing that RSSI preserves exploitable Doppler, Angle-of-Arrival (AoA), and delay cues associated with human motion. WiRSSI then extracts Doppler-AoA features via a 2D Fast Fourier Transform and infers delay from amplitude-only information in the absence of subcarrier-level phase. The estimated AoA and delay are then mapped to Cartesian coordinates and denoised to recover motion trajectories. Experiments in practical environments show that WiRSSI achieves median XY localization errors of 0.905 m, 0.784 m, and 0.785 m for elliptical, linear, and rectangular trajectories, respectively. In comparison, a representative CSI-based method attains median errors of 0.574 m, 0.599 m, and 0.514 m, corresponding to an average accuracy gap of 0.26 m. These results demonstrate that, despite its lower resolution, RSSI can support practical passive sensing and offers a low-cost alternative to CSI-based WiFi sensing.