With the proliferating of wireless demands, wireless local area network (WLAN) becomes one of the most important wireless networks. Network intelligence is promising for the next generation wireless networks, captured lots of attentions. Sensing is one efficient enabler to achieve network intelligence since utilizing sensing can obtain diverse and valuable non-communication information. Thus, integrating sensing and communications (ISAC) is a promising technology for future wireless networks. Sensing assisted communication (SAC) is an important branch of ISAC, but there are few related works focusing on the systematical and comprehensive analysis on SAC in WLAN. This article is the first work to systematically analyze SAC in the next generation WLAN from the system simulation perspective. We analyze the scenarios and advantages of SAC. Then, from system simulation perspective, several sources of performance gain brought from SAC are proposed, i.e. beam link failure, protocol overhead, and intra-physical layer protocol data unit (intra-PPDU) performance decrease, while several important influencing factors are described in detail. Performance evaluation is deeply analyzed and the performance gain of the SAC in both living room and street canyon scenarios are verified by system simulation. Finally, we provide our insights on the future directions of SAC for the next generation WLAN.

翻译：随着无线需求的激增，无线局域网（WLAN）已成为最重要的无线网络之一。网络智能化是下一代无线网络极具前景的发展方向，吸引了广泛关注。感知是利用传感获取多样化且有价值的非通信信息的有效手段，因此感知与通信一体化（ISAC）成为未来无线网络的一项关键技术。感知辅助通信（SAC）是ISAC的重要分支，但目前鲜有研究对WLAN中的SAC进行系统且全面的分析。本文首次从系统仿真视角系统分析了下一代WLAN中的SAC。我们阐述了SAC的应用场景及其优势，随后从系统仿真角度提出了SAC带来的多项性能增益来源，包括波束链路故障、协议开销以及物理层协议数据单元内（intra-PPDU）性能下降，并详细描述了若干关键影响因素。通过深度性能评估，我们利用系统仿真验证了SAC在客厅和街道峡谷场景中的性能增益。最后，对下一代WLAN中SAC的未来发展方向提出了见解。