Integrating Sensing and Communications for Ubiquitous IoT: Applications, Trends, and Challenges

By Yuanhao Cui, Fangfang Liu, Xiaojun Jing, Junsheng Mu. IEEE Network, 2021

993 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent advances in wireless communication and solid-state circuits together with the enormous demands of sensing ability have given rise to a new enabling technology, integrated (radar) sensing and communication (ISAC). ISAC captures two main advantages over dedicated sensing and communication functionalities: integration gain to efficiently utilize congested wireless/hardware resources, and even more interesting, coordination gain to balance dual-functional performance or/and perform mutual assistance. Triggered by ISAC, we are also witnessing a paradigm shift in the ubiquitous IoT architecture, in which the sensing and communication layers are tending to partially converge into a new layer, namely, the signaling layer. In this article, we first attempt to introduce a definition of ISAC, analyze the various influencing forces, and present several novel use cases. Then we complement the understanding of the signaling layer by presenting several key benefits in the IoT era. We classify existing dominant ISAC solutions based on the layers in which integration is applied. Finally, several challenges and opportunities are identified. We hope that this overview article will serve as a primary starting point for new researchers and offer a bird's-eye view of the existing ISAC-related advances.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Media Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6b8b5b18bf2ca6e6eb89c14b271a7e5eba9863e1

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. Rui Zhang
2. Jie Xu
3. Qingqing Wu
4. Changsheng You
5. Yonina C. Eldar
6. Wenyan Ma
7. Fan Liu
8. Christos Masouros

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Rui Zhang
2. Jie Xu
3. Qingqing Wu
4. Changsheng You
5. Wenyan Ma
6. Emil Björnson
7. Yong Zeng
8. Xiaoming Chen

In Media Technology

1. Yonina C. Eldar
2. Rui Zhang
3. Tony X. Han
4. Qingqing Wu

Citations in the corpus

• On the Fundamental Tradeoff of Integrated Sensing and Communications Under Gaussian Channels (2022, neutral): “Background and Related Works IN AN ISAC system, wireless communications and sensing functionalities are performed by using a single hardware platform and a common radio waveform over the same frequency band, which considerably improves the energy-, spectral-, and hardware-efficiencies [1], [2], [3],”
• Integrated Sensing and Communications: Recent Advances and Ten Open Challenges (2023, background): “…autonomous systems [16], autonomous driving [17], human activity sensing [18], as well as smart home and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks [19], [20] that rely on sensing functionalities, such as wireless localization in support of compelling services [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26], [27].”
• Integrated Sensing and Communications: Toward Dual-Functional Wireless Networks for 6G and Beyond (2021, methodology): “We refer readers to [2] for a detailed examination on other types of perceptive networks, such as Wi-Fi and the IoT.”
• Throughput Maximization for UAV-Enabled Integrated Periodic Sensing and Communication (2022, background): “However, the above works on ISAC [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [29], [30], [32] mainly focused on exploring the per-”
• Target Sensing With Intelligent Reflecting Surface: Architecture and Performance (2022, background): “This thus gives rise to the emerging research area of joint communication and sensing, which advocates to share the hardware, platform, and radio resource in the design and use of communication and sensing systems to achieve their substantially enhanced performance with reduced cost [3]–[6].”