SDP: A Unified Protocol and Benchmarking Framework for Reproducible Wireless Sensing

Abstract

Learning-based wireless sensing has made rapid progress, yet the field still lacks a unified and reproducible experimental foundation. Unlike computer vision, wireless sensing relies on hardware-dependent channel measurements whose representations, preprocessing pipelines, and evaluation protocols vary significantly across devices and datasets, hindering fair comparison and reproducibility. This paper proposes the Sensing Data Protocol (SDP), a protocol-level abstraction and unified benchmark for scalable wireless sensing. SDP acts as a standardization layer that decouples learning tasks from hardware heterogeneity. To this end, SDP enforces deterministic physical-layer sanitization, canonical tensor construction, and standardized training and evaluation procedures, decoupling learning performance from hardware-specific artifacts. Rather than introducing task-specific models, SDP establishes a principled protocol foundation for fair evaluation across diverse sensing tasks and platforms. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SDP achieves competitive accuracy while substantially improving stability, reducing inter-seed performance variance by orders of magnitude on complex activity recognition tasks. A real-world experiment using commercial off-the-shelf Wi-Fi hardware further illustrating the protocol's interoperability across heterogeneous hardware. By providing a unified protocol and benchmark, SDP enables reproducible and comparable wireless sensing research and supports the transition from ad hoc experimentation toward reliable engineering practice.