SDP: A Unified Protocol and Benchmarking Framework for Reproducible Wireless Sensing

TL;DR

SDP introduces a standardized protocol and benchmark for wireless sensing, enabling reproducibility, fair comparison, and stability across diverse hardware and sensing tasks, thus advancing reliable wireless sensing research.

Contribution

It proposes the Sensing Data Protocol (SDP), a unified framework that standardizes experimental procedures and evaluation for wireless sensing, decoupling hardware effects from learning performance.

Findings

SDP achieves competitive accuracy across tasks.

Significantly reduces performance variance.

Demonstrates interoperability with commercial hardware.

Abstract

Learning-based wireless sensing has made rapid progress, yet the field still lacks a unified and reproducible experimental foundation. Unlike computer vision, wireless sensing relies on hardware-dependent channel measurements whose representations, preprocessing pipelines, and evaluation protocols vary significantly across devices and datasets, hindering fair comparison and reproducibility. This paper proposes the Sensing Data Protocol (SDP), a protocol-level abstraction and unified benchmark for scalable wireless sensing. SDP acts as a standardization layer that decouples learning tasks from hardware heterogeneity. To this end, SDP enforces deterministic physical-layer sanitization, canonical tensor construction, and standardized training and evaluation procedures, decoupling learning performance from hardware-specific artifacts. Rather than introducing task-specific models, SDP establishes a principled protocol foundation for fair evaluation across diverse sensing tasks and platforms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SDP achieves competitive accuracy while substantially improving stability, reducing inter-seed performance variance by orders of magnitude on complex activity recognition tasks. A real-world experiment using commercial off-the-shelf Wi-Fi hardware further illustrating the protocol's interoperability across heterogeneous hardware. By providing a unified protocol and benchmark, SDP enables reproducible and comparable wireless sensing research and supports the transition from ad hoc experimentation toward reliable engineering practice.