CSI Simulation: Why Additive Noise Fails and How to Fix It
A. Bouferroum, I. Alla, V. Lenders, V. Loscri
Preprint (HAL) · 2026 Under Review
Wi-Fi sensing models are usually trained on noise-simulated data. We show why that breaks inside real receivers, and how to fix it…
Most Wi-Fi sensing models are trained on simulated data built by adding noise to recorded channel estimates. We tested that assumption on six commodity receivers and found it breaks: the receiver's automatic gain control compresses the signal in ways no additive noise can reproduce. Our answer is MQTC, a measurement-calibrated model combining quantile mapping, temporal filtering, and copula-based reordering, which cuts amplitude error 8-fold and closes 89% of the fidelity gap. Classifiers trained on MQTC data recover 93% of real-world jamming-detection performance, while noise-trained ones remain near random.
@misc{bouferroum2026csisimulationadditivenoise,
title={CSI Simulation: Why Additive Noise Fails and How to Fix It},
author={Aymen Bouferroum and Ildi Alla and Vincent Lenders and Valeria Loscri},
year={2026},
eprint={2607.01882},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.NI},
url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.01882},
}