  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.
