Performance Evaluation of IEEE 802.11bf Protocol in the sub-7 GHz Band

Changes in Wi-Fi signal, using Wi-Fi sensing, have been used to detect movements in the environment and have led to development of many related applications. However, there has not been a standard way to do this until the IEEE 802.11bf standard development activity was taken up recently by the IEEE. Wi-Fi sensing is an overhead to data communication. While the IEEE 802.11bf standard has been designed with careful attention to the overhead and its impact on data communication, there has been no study done to quantify those. Therefore, in this paper, we evaluate performance of IEEE 802.11bf protocol with different system configurations corresponding to different sensing loads and the impact of sensing on data communication in those configurations. We outline some of the key findings from our simulation experiments which may be useful in practical operating configurations of an IEEE 802.11bf network.