Towards Multi-Functional 6G Wireless Networks: Integrating Sensing, Communication and Security

By Zhongxiang Wei, Fan Liu, Christos Masouros, Nanchi Su, Athina P. Petropulu. 2021

423 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has recently emerged as a candidate 6G technology, aiming to unify the two key operations of the future network in spectrum/energy/cost efficient way. ISAC involves communicating information to receivers and simultaneously sensing targets, while both operations use the same waveforms, the same transmitter and ultimately the same network infrastructure. Nevertheless, the inclusion of information signalling into the probing waveform for target sensing raises unique and difficult challenges from the perspective of information security. At the same time, the sensing capability incorporated in the ISAC transmission offers unique opportunities to design secure ISAC techniques. This overview paper discusses these unique challenges and opportunities for the next generation of ISAC networks. We first briefly discuss the fundamentals of waveform design for sensing and communication. Then, we detail the challenges and contradictory objectives involved in securing ISAC transmission, along with state-of-the-art approaches to address them. We then identify the new opportunity of using the sensing capability to obtain knowledge of the targets, as an enabling approach against known weaknesses of PHY security. Finally, we illustrate a low-cost secure ISAC architecture, followed by a series of open research topics. This family of sensing-aided secure ISAC techniques brings a new insight on providing information security, with an eye on robust and hardware-constrained designs tailored for low-cost ISAC devices.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/48978fc0fbb948ee86249a75a2f02094987f6194

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Citations in the corpus

Integrated Sensing and Communications: Toward Dual-Functional Wireless Networks for 6G and Beyond (2021, background): “Importantly, the sensing functionality offers new opportunities with respect to making PHY security solutions practical [202].”
Covert Communications: A Comprehensive Survey (2023, background): “It proposes the concept of space-air-ground-sea seamless coverage, where the information of human society will become available anywhere, and thus the security becomes a more critical factor [209].”
Integrated Sensing and Communications: Recent Advances and Ten Open Challenges (2023, background): “4) ISAC Applications: The ISAC network of the future has to be rolled out with security and privacy guarantees [190], [191].”