  As Wi-Fi becomes ubiquitous in public and private spaces, it becomes natural
to leverage its intrinsic ability to sense the surrounding environment to
implement groundbreaking wireless sensing applications such as human presence
detection, activity recognition, and object tracking. For this reason, the IEEE
802.11bf Task Group is defining the appropriate modifications to existing Wi-Fi
standards to enhance sensing capabilities through 802.11-compliant devices.
However, the new standard is expected to leave the specific sensing algorithms
open to implementation. To fill this gap, this article explores the practical
implications of integrating sensing into Wi-Fi networks. We provide an overview
of the physical and medium access control layers sensing enablers, together
with the application layer perspective. We analyze the impact of communication
parameters on sensing performance and detail the main research challenges. To
make our evaluation replicable, we pledge to release all of our dataset and
code to the community.
