Performance Evaluation of Shared-Channel Wi-Fi Sensing and Communication in IoT Networks

In recent years, the integration of sensing applications into Wi-Fi networks led to growing interest in leveraging existing infrastructure for both data acquisition and communication, specially in the context of distributed sensing. Current Wi-Fi sensing systems prioritize application functionality over the transmission and aggregation of collected data within a centralized processing unit, which is essential to implement end-to-end solutions. To address this aspect of integrated sensing systems, we investigate the impact of cooperative Wi-Fi sensing for IoT devices that share a communication channel in order to take advantage of the services of a commercial access point. Our study takes latency, jitter and packet delivery ratio into consideration over different sampling rates and number of sensors. Although channel congestion arose from multiple devices transmitting sensed data, the evaluated configurations generally achieved acceptable performance metrics, particularly for lower sampling rates, where the average delivery ratio exceeded 80% and the latency averaged below 50 ms.