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.

翻译：随着Wi-Fi在公共与私人空间的普及，利用其固有的环境感知能力以实现突破性无线传感应用（如人体存在检测、活动识别与目标追踪）变得顺理成章。为此，IEEE 802.11bf任务组正着手对现有Wi-Fi标准进行针对性修订，旨在通过兼容802.11的设备增强感知能力。然而，新标准预计将具体感知算法的实现方案保持开放。为填补这一空白，本文探讨了将感知功能集成至Wi-Fi网络的实践意义。我们从物理层与媒体接入控制层的感知使能技术出发，结合应用层视角进行综述，分析通信参数对感知性能的影响，并详述主要研究挑战。为确保评估的可复现性，我们承诺向学界公开全部数据集与代码。