csiread

A fast channel state information parser for Intel, Atheros, Nexmon, ESP32 and PicoScenes in Python.

• Full support for Linux 802.11n CSI Tool, Atheros CSI Tool, nexmon_csi and ESP32-CSI-Tool
• Support for PicoScenes is experimental.
• At least 15 times faster than the implementation in Matlab
• Real-time parsing and visualization.

real-time plotting

Introduction

Various CSI Tools only provide Matlab API parsing CSI data files. Those who want to process CSI with Python have to install Matlab to convert .dat to .mat. This process is redundant and inefficient. Therefore, Python API is recommended. Unfortunately, the API implemented in pure Python is inefficient. With this in mind, I implemented csiread in Cython(Pybind11 may be another great choice). The table below shows the performance of different implementations. They were all tested with 40k packets on the same computer.

Function	Matlab	Python3+Numpy	csiread	file size
Nexmon.read:bcm4339	3.2309s	0.2739s	0.0703s	44.0MB
Nexmon.read:bcm4358	3.5987s	23.0025s	0.1227s	44.0MB
Atheros.read	3.3081s	14.6021s	0.0956s	76.3MB
Intel.read	1.6102s	7.6624s	0.0479s	21.0MB
Intel.get_total_rss	0.1786s	0.0030s	0.0030s
Intel.get_scaled_csi	0.5497s	0.1225s	0.0376s/0.0278s
Intel.get_scaled_csi_sm	5.0097s	0.3627s	0.0778s/0.0465s

This tool is not only the translation of the Matlab API, but also a CSI toolbox. I added some utilities, real-time visualization and algorithms code in the examples folder. These would be useful for Python-based CSI researchers.

Install

pip3 install csiread

Quickstart

import csiread

# Linux 802.11n CSI Tool
csifile = "../material/5300/dataset/sample_0x1_ap.dat"
csidata = csiread.Intel(csifile, nrxnum=3, ntxnum=2, pl_size=10)
csidata.read()
csi = csidata.get_scaled_csi()
print(csidata.csi.shape)

# Atheros CSI Tool
csifile = "../material/atheros/dataset/ath_csi_1.dat"
csidata = csiread.Atheros(csifile, nrxnum=3, ntxnum=2, pl_size=10, tones=56)
csidata.read(endian='little')
print(csidata.csi.shape)

# nexmon_csi
csifile = "../material/nexmon/dataset/example.pcap"
csidata = csiread.Nexmon(csifile, chip='4358', bw=80)
csidata.read()
print(csidata.csi.shape)

# ESP32-CSI-Tool
csifile = "../material/esp32/dataset/example_csi.csv"
csidata = csiread.ESP32(csifile, csi_only=True)
csidata.read()
print(csidata.csi.shape)

# PicoScenes
csifile = "../material/picoscenes/dataset/rx_by_iwl5300.csi"
csidata = csiread.Picoscenes(csifile, {'CSI': [30, 3, 2], 'MPDU': 1522})
csidata.read()
csidata.check()
print(csidata.raw['CSI']['CSI'].shape)

examples are the best usage instructions. The API documentation can be found in docstring of file core.py, so we won't repeat them here.

Build from source

cd csiread
pip3 install -r requirements.txt
python3 setup.py sdist bdist_wheel
pip3 install -U dist/csiread*.whl

* is a shell wildcard. After running python3 setup.py sdist bdist_wheel,there will be a wheel file like csiread-1.3.4-cp36-cp36m-win_amd64.whl in the dist folder. Replace csiread*.whl with it.

csiread is written in Cython, Cython requires a C compiler to be present on the system. You can refer to Installing Cython for more details. If you don't want to install a C compiler, just fork the project and push a tag to the latest commit. Then wheel files can be found in Github-Actions-Python package-Artifacts: csiread_dist

Design

csiread provides 7 classes: Intel, Atheros, Nexmon, AtherosPull10, NexmonPull46, ESP32 and Picoscenes. Each class has 4 key methods: read(), seek(), pmsg() and display() which are used for reading a file, reading a file from a specific position, real-time parsing and viewing the contents of a packet respectively. csiread.utils provides some common functions.

Nexmon CSI

• csiread.Nexmon is based on the commit of nexmon_csi(Aug 29, 2020): ba99ce12a6a42d7e4ec75e6f8ace8f610ed2eb60
• csiread.NexmonPull256 is the same as csiread.NexmonPull46. It works with the latest master branch (Dec 11, 2021): c037576b7035619e2716229c7622f4e8c511635f
• The Nexmon.group is experimental, it may be incorrect due to core and spatial. core and spatial are ZERO or not recorded correctly in some files. I don't know how to solve it.

ESP32-CSI-Tool

• pandas.read_csv and csiread.ESP32 have the similar performance, but pandas.read_csv is much more flexible.

PicoScenes

The support for Picoscenes is an experimental feature. PicoScenes is still under active development, csiread cannot be updated synchronously.

• csidata.raw is a structured array in numpy and stores the parsed result.
• Mag and Phase fileds have been removed, use np.abs and np.angle instead.
• Call check() method after read(), Then set pl_size according to the report.
• Edge padding are applied to raw["xxx"]["SubcarrierIndex"] for plotting.
• The method pmsg has been implemented, but not yet ready.
• Accessing CSI like csidata.CSI.CSI is only available after calling read method.
• 5-10 times faster than before
• parseCSIMVM(...) in _picoscenes.pyx may be incorrect.

csiread.Picoscenes is based on the PicoScenes MATLAB Toolbox(PMT)(Last modified at 2022-01-21).