Sensing Assisted Communication for the Next Generation mmWave WLAN: System Simulation Perspective

TL;DR

This paper systematically analyzes sensing assisted communication (SAC) in next-generation WLANs through system simulation, highlighting its advantages, performance gains, influencing factors, and future directions.

Contribution

First comprehensive system simulation analysis of SAC in WLAN, identifying performance benefits and influencing factors for future wireless network design.

Findings

SAC reduces beam link failure and protocol overhead.

SAC improves intra-PPDU performance in WLAN scenarios.

Performance gains are verified in living room and street canyon environments.

Abstract

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.