Acknowledgements & References

Acknowledgements

csi-rs is built on work we did not do, and it is worth naming.

The Espressif Rust ecosystem. esp-hal, esp-radio, esp-rtos, esp-println, esp-backtrace, esp-generate, and espflash are the foundation this project stands on. Every capability in esp-csi-rs is a thin layer over a driver somebody else maintains, and the no_std story described in this book would not exist without them. Espressif’s decision to expose CSI natively in their SDK is, more than any other single event, the reason edge Wi-Fi sensing became practical.

The embedded Rust community. embassy for the async executor and timers, heapless for the collections that make a lock-free hot path possible, postcard and serde for serialization, and defmt from Ferrous Systems for logging that a microcontroller can actually afford.

The researchers who made CSI extractable at all. The Intel 5300 CSI Tool (Halperin et al.) and Nexmon CSI (Gringoli et al.) proved the thing was possible on commodity hardware, years before any vendor supported it. Steven M. Hernandez’s ESP32-CSI-Tool did the same for Espressif parts and remains the reference implementation many analysis pipelines were written against — esp-csi-rs implements its CSV format directly for that reason.

The dataset and benchmark authors. SenseFi, MM-Fi, Widar 3.0, and NTU-Fi are what make it possible to evaluate a sensing idea before building the hardware for it, and the NTU MARS Lab’s Awesome-WiFi-CSI-Sensing is how most people find them.

Contributors to this book and to the crates it documents. Including everyone who has filed an issue describing a capture that did not work — a surprising amount of Troubleshooting & Calibration came from exactly those reports.

References

Consolidated from the citations throughout this book.

Papers

Armenta-Garcia, J. A., Gonzalez-Navarro, F. F., Caro-Gutierrez, J., & Garcia-Reyes, C. I. (2025). Tools and Methods for Achieving Wi-Fi Sensing in Embedded Devices. Sensors, 25(19), 6220. https://doi.org/10.3390/s25196220

Gringoli, F., Schulz, M., Link, J., & Hollick, M. (2019). Free Your CSI: A Channel State Information Extraction Platform For Modern Wi-Fi Devices. Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Wireless Network Testbeds, Experimental Evaluation & Characterization. https://github.com/seemoo-lab/nexmon_csi

Halperin, D., Hu, W., Sheth, A., & Wetherall, D. (2011). Tool Release: Gathering 802.11n Traces with Channel State Information. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 41(1), 53. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1925861.1925870

Hernandez, S. M., & Bulut, E. (2023). WiFi Sensing on the Edge: Signal Processing Techniques and Challenges for Real-World Systems. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 25(1), 46–76. https://doi.org/10.1109/COMST.2022.3209144

Standards

IEEE 802.11bf Task Group. WLAN Sensing. https://www.ieee802.org/11/Reports/tgbf_update.htm

Tools & Datasets

Espressif Systems. ESP-CSI Solution Introduction. ESP Techpedia. https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-techpedia/en/latest/esp-friends/solution-introduction/esp-csi/esp-csi-solution.html

Espressif Systems. The Rust on ESP Book. https://docs.espressif.com/projects/rust/book/

Hernandez, S. M. (2020). ESP32-CSI-Tool. https://stevenmhernandez.github.io/ESP32-CSI-Tool/

NTU MARS Lab. (2025). Awesome WiFi CSI Sensing. https://github.com/NTUMARS/Awesome-WiFi-CSI-Sensing

csi-rs Crates and Repositories

License

The csi-rs crates are dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0, at your option.