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Toward Integrated Sensing and Communications in IEEE 802.11bf Wi-Fi Networks

Francesca Meneghello, Cheng Chen, Carlos Cordeiro, Francesco Restuccia

TL;DR

The paper surveys the emerging paradigm of Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) in Wi‑Fi, focusing on IEEE 802.11bf as the enabling standard for exposing sensing primitives and enabling sensing-enabled applications indoors. It analyzes physical/MAC-layer enablers, surveys model-based, learning-based, and hybrid sensing algorithms, and reports an experimental evaluation with commercial 802.11ax devices to study how sensing depends on bandwidth, sub-channel selection, and sampling rates. The work outlines critical research challenges across data collection and processing, security/privacy, cooperative and multi-band sensing, spectrum-sharing constraints, and the integration of sensing with communications, offering practical guidance and promising directions for plug‑and‑play sensing in real deployments. By committing to release datasets and code, the authors promote replicability and accelerate progress toward scalable, secure, and broadly accessible Wi‑Fi sensing capabilities.

Abstract

As Wi-Fi becomes ubiquitous in public and private spaces, it becomes natural to leverage its intrinsic ability to sense the surrounding environment to implement groundbreaking wireless sensing applications such as human presence detection, activity recognition, and object tracking. For this reason, the IEEE 802.11bf Task Group is defining the appropriate modifications to existing Wi-Fi standards to enhance sensing capabilities through 802.11-compliant devices. However, the new standard is expected to leave the specific sensing algorithms open to implementation. To fill this gap, this article explores the practical implications of integrating sensing into Wi-Fi networks. We provide an overview of the physical and medium access control layers sensing enablers, together with the application layer perspective. We analyze the impact of communication parameters on sensing performance and detail the main research challenges. To make our evaluation replicable, we pledge to release all of our dataset and code to the community.

Toward Integrated Sensing and Communications in IEEE 802.11bf Wi-Fi Networks

TL;DR

The paper surveys the emerging paradigm of Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) in Wi‑Fi, focusing on IEEE 802.11bf as the enabling standard for exposing sensing primitives and enabling sensing-enabled applications indoors. It analyzes physical/MAC-layer enablers, surveys model-based, learning-based, and hybrid sensing algorithms, and reports an experimental evaluation with commercial 802.11ax devices to study how sensing depends on bandwidth, sub-channel selection, and sampling rates. The work outlines critical research challenges across data collection and processing, security/privacy, cooperative and multi-band sensing, spectrum-sharing constraints, and the integration of sensing with communications, offering practical guidance and promising directions for plug‑and‑play sensing in real deployments. By committing to release datasets and code, the authors promote replicability and accelerate progress toward scalable, secure, and broadly accessible Wi‑Fi sensing capabilities.

Abstract

As Wi-Fi becomes ubiquitous in public and private spaces, it becomes natural to leverage its intrinsic ability to sense the surrounding environment to implement groundbreaking wireless sensing applications such as human presence detection, activity recognition, and object tracking. For this reason, the IEEE 802.11bf Task Group is defining the appropriate modifications to existing Wi-Fi standards to enhance sensing capabilities through 802.11-compliant devices. However, the new standard is expected to leave the specific sensing algorithms open to implementation. To fill this gap, this article explores the practical implications of integrating sensing into Wi-Fi networks. We provide an overview of the physical and medium access control layers sensing enablers, together with the application layer perspective. We analyze the impact of communication parameters on sensing performance and detail the main research challenges. To make our evaluation replicable, we pledge to release all of our dataset and code to the community.
Paper Structure (15 sections, 6 figures)

This paper contains 15 sections, 6 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. The Integrated Sensing and Communications Paradigm
  3. Physical and Medium Access Control Layers: Wi-Fi Sensing Enablers
  4. Frequency and Spatial Diversity for Sensing
  5. Application Layer: Wi-Fi Sensing Algorithms
  6. Model-based Approaches
  7. Learning-based and Hybrid Approaches
  8. Do Communications Parameters Matter? Evaluation with Commercial 802.11 Devices
  9. Is everything ready? Research Challenges about Integrating Sensing into Wi-Fi Networks
  10. Data Collection, Transmission and Processing
  11. Sensing Security and Privacy
  12. Cooperative and Multi-band Sensing
  13. Sensing in Spectrum-Sharing Bands
  14. Integrating Sensing and Communications
  15. Concluding Remarks

Figures (6)

  • Figure 1: Experimental setup for sensing data collection and processing.
  • Figure 2: Average accuracy and F1-score with different .
  • Figure 3: Average accuracy and F1-score considering different sampling periods and number of Wi-Fi channel readings used as input for the activity classifier.
  • Figure 4: Integration of sensing in Wi-Fi networks. Channel data are collected by the sensing units. Hence, the sensing application is executed on the computing units. Sensing applications can be downloaded from a marketplace.
  • Figure 5: Multi-band cooperative sensing-aided Wi-Fi Systems.
  • ...and 1 more figures