Joint Design of Communication and Sensing for Beyond 5G and 6G Systems

By Thorsten Wild, V. Braun, Harish Viswanathan. IEEE Access, 2021

481 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The 6G vision of creating authentic digital twin representations of the physical world calls for new sensing solutions to compose multi-layered maps of our environments. Radio sensing using the mobile communication network as a sensor has the potential to become an essential component of the solution. With the evolution of cellular systems to mmWave bands in 5G and potentially sub-THz bands in 6G, small cell deployments will begin to dominate. Large bandwidth systems deployed in small cell configurations provide an unprecedented opportunity to employ the mobile network for sensing. In this paper, we focus on the major design aspects of such a cellular joint communication and sensing (JCAS) system. We present an analysis of the choice of the waveform that points towards choosing the one that is best suited for communication also for radar sensing. We discuss several techniques for efficiently integrating the sensing capability into the JCAS system, some of which are applicable with NR air-interface for evolved 5G systems. Specifically, methods for reducing sensing overhead by appropriate sensing signal design or by configuring separate numerologies for communications and sensing are presented. Sophisticated use of the sensing signals is shown to reduce the signaling overhead by a factor of 2.67 for an exemplary road traffic monitoring use case. We then present a vision for future advanced JCAS systems building upon distributed massive MIMO and discuss various other research challenges for JCAS that need to be addressed in order to pave the way towards natively integrated JCAS in 6G.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/55c67db12df12684d1ea0c85ea7e58dd8a688913

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aerospace Engineering

1. Arumgam Nallanathan
2. Wen Chen
3. Kaitao Meng
4. Jun Li
5. Kunlun Wang
6. Shaodan Ma
7. Zehui Xiong
8. F. Yu

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Arumgam Nallanathan
2. Zehui Xiong
3. Wen Chen
4. Kaitao Meng
5. Jun Li
6. Kunlun Wang
7. Shaodan Ma
8. Qingqing Wu

Citations in the corpus

• Throughput Maximization for UAV-Enabled Integrated Periodic Sensing and Communication (2022, background): “In the industry, ISAC is regarded as a key technology in Huawei and Nokia for future wireless network investigations [13], [14]; “Hexa-X” project”
• Covert Communications: A Comprehensive Survey (2023, background): “However, by sharing the radio resource and hardware platform, the interference can be eliminated and the performance can be further improved, which is called the integrated sensing and communication system [214], [215].”
• Optimal Transmit Beamforming for Integrated Sensing and Communication (2021, unknown): “On one hand, with such integration, ISAC can significantly enhance the spectrum utilization efficiency and cost efficiency by exploiting the dual use of radio signals and infrastructures for both radar sensing and wireless communication [19].”