Calibrating Phase Offsets for Commodity WiFi

Dongheng Zhang, Yang Hu, Yan Chen, Bing Zeng

Abstract: The calibration of phase offsets between RF chains on commodity WiFi chips has been an key obstacle for many WiFi-based applications. In this paper, we conduct extensive experiments to explore the characteristics of the phase offsets. The real experimental results reveal that the phase offsets are actually deterministic. We explain such a phenomena via the circuit design of WiFi chips. We also show that the phase offsets are even the same among different chips. With extensive experiments, we obtain and report the measured phase offset values for the commodity Intel 5300 and Atheros AR9380 WiFi chips. With the observation illustrated in this paper, the calibration of the phase offsets can be simplified greatly.