Path to Diversity: A Primer on ISAC-izing Commodity Wi-Fi for Practical Deployments

Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) has emerged as a key paradigm in next-generation wireless networks. While the ubiquity and low deployment cost of commodity Wi-Fi render it an ideal platform for wide-scale sensing, it is the continuous evolution of Wi-Fi standards—towards higher frequency bands, wider bandwidths, and larger antenna arrays—that fundamentally unlocks the physical resources required for high-performance ISAC, thereby triggering a surge of related proposals. To structure this rapidly expanding field, a plethora of surveys have appeared. However, prevailing literature predominantly adopts a top-down perspective, emphasizing upper-layer applications or deep learning models while treating the physical layer as an opaque abstraction. Consequently, these works often fail to touch the “bottom layer” of signal formation and lack substantive technical guidance on how to overcome the fundamental physical barriers that constrain sensing performance. To bridge this gap, this tutorial takes a bottom-up approach, systematically analyzing the sensing gains brought by Wi-Fi advancements through the lens of physical-layer diversity. We organize the technical framework around four orthogonal dimensions: 1) Temporal Diversity addresses synchronization gaps to enable absolute ranging; 2) Frequency Diversity expands the effective bandwidth to sharpen range resolution; 3) Link Diversity leverages distributed topologies and digital feedback to achieve ubiquitous observability; and 4) Spatial Diversity utilizes multi-antenna arrays to combine passive angular discrimination with active directional control. Collectively, these orthogonal dimensions resolve fundamental ambiguities in time, range, and space, thereby bridging physical capabilities with challenging sensing diversities such as general-purpose multi-person sensing. By synthesizing these dimensions, this tutorial provides a comprehensive guide for “ISAC-izing” commodity Wi-Fi, paving the way for future standardization and robust deployment.