Millions of smart home devices equipped with wireless sensors have gradually entered people’s homes and improved the quality of life. Wireless communication with sensors is crucial for remote automatic control of smart devices. Packet detection is one of the key technologies in wireless communication systems and faces the challenges of detection accuracy and power consumption. In households, WiFi devices are widely deployed. Therefore, we focus on IEEE 802.11 OFDM packet detection algorithms for household wireless sensor communication. We first introduce four packet detection algorithms and verify their feasibility by simulation experiments. Then, we identify two important factors that affect detection accuracy and provide suggestions for algorithm improvement. Further, we compare and discuss the performance of the four algorithms from three dimensions in detail. The results show that each algorithm has its own advantages, and the auto-correlation algorithm has the best overall performance. Finally, we point out the open challenges and future research directions in this field.