  The wireless communications landscape is anticipated to offer new service
levels following the introduction of the millimeter-wave (mmWave) spectrum to
consumer electronics. With their broad bandwidths and corresponding multi-Gbps
data rates, these mmWaves are a perfect fit for data hungry applications, such
as streaming video to extended reality devices. However, the latter are also
bound by maximal latency constraints as low as 1 ms. Understanding where such
minuscule time delays lurk requires a close-up study of individual layers in
the network stack. Starting from the bottom up, the present work describes an
endeavor at uncloaking the origins of physical layer (PHY) latency in mmWave
Wi-Fi networks. It proposes a newly designed simulation framework and sheds
light on how any conventional laboratory can be turned into a virtual
experiment setting, speeding up computation. A case study based on the IEEE
802.11ad standard demonstrates the framework's ability to track packet latency
at the PHY-level and identify individual bottlenecks. In particular, it
evaluates the impact of the number of LDPC decoding iterations on latency in
short transmission sequences.
