Enabling Joint Communication and Radar Sensing in Mobile Networks—A Survey

By S. M. I. J. Andrew Zhang, Md. Lushanur Rahman, Kai Wu, Senior Member Ieee Xiaojing Huang, F. I. Y. Jay Guo, Ieee Shanzhi Chen Fellow, Fellow Ieee Jinhong Yuan, Shan-zhi Chen. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2020

1,091 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Mobile network is evolving from a communication-only network towards one with joint communication and radar/radio sensing (JCAS) capabilities, that we call perceptive mobile network (PMN). Radio sensing here refers to information retrieval from received mobile signals for objects of interest in the environment surrounding the radio transceivers, and it may go beyond the functions of localization, tracking, and object recognition of traditional radar. In PMNs, JCAS integrates sensing into communications, sharing a majority of system modules and the same transmitted signals. The PMN is expected to provide a ubiquitous radio sensing platform and enable a vast number of novel smart applications, whilst providing non-compromised communications. In this paper, we present a broad picture of the motivation, methodologies, challenges, and research opportunities of realizing PMN, by providing a comprehensive survey for systems and technologies developed mainly in the last ten years. Beginning by reviewing the work on coexisting communication and radar systems, we highlight their limits on addressing the interference problem, and then introduce the JCAS technology. We then set up JCAS in the mobile network context and envisage its potential applications. We continue to provide a brief review of three types of JCAS systems, with particular attention to their differences in design philosophy. We then introduce a framework of PMN, including the system platform and infrastructure, three types of sensing operations, and signals usable for sensing. Subsequently, we discuss required system modifications to enable sensing on current communication-only infrastructure. Within the context of PMN, we review stimulating research problems and potential solutions, organized under nine topics: performance bounds, waveform optimization, antenna array design, clutter suppression, sensing parameter estimation, resolution of sensing ambiguity, pattern analysis, networked sensing under cellular topology, and sensing-assisted communications. We conclude the paper by listing key open research problems for the aforementioned topics and sharing some lessons that we have learned.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ad34e2ab5dad94b16ccebf506c6e8247510e105

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In Aerospace Engineering

1. Derrick Wing Kwan Ng
2. Jie Xu
3. Rui Zhang
4. Qingqing Wu
5. Arumgam Nallanathan
6. Wei Xu
7. Zhenyao He
8. Hong Shen

In Biomedical Engineering

1. Zhonghao Lyu
2. Guangxu Zhu
3. Yonina C. Eldar
4. Jie Xu
5. Marco F. Duarte
6. Moshe Mishali
7. Zhilin Zhang
8. Bhaskar D. Rao

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Rui Zhang
2. Qingqing Wu
3. Derrick Wing Kwan Ng
4. Jie Xu
5. Arumgam Nallanathan
6. Guangxu Zhu
7. Wei Xu
8. Zhenyao He

Citations in the corpus

• Covert Communications: A Comprehensive Survey (2023, background): “Combining sensing and communication can currently share the overlapped bands, which may result in interference to both of these two systems [213].”
• UAV-Enabled Integrated Sensing and Communication: Opportunities and Challenges (2022, background): “links to long-range targets which lead to seriously degraded sensing performance [3], [4].”
• A Tutorial on Fluid Antenna System for 6G Networks: Encompassing Communication Theory, Optimization Methods and Hardware Designs (2024, background): “Notably, MIMO schemes have gained widespread recognition for their pivotal role in this configuration because they offer precoding capabilities for achieving spatial beamforming and waveform shaping [269].”
• Joint Maneuver and Beamforming Design for UAV-Enabled Integrated Sensing and Communication (2021, methodology): “Towards this end, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) [3], [4] (a.k.a. radar-communication (RadCom) [5], dual-functional radar communication (DFRC) [6], [7], joint communication and radar sensing (JCAS) [2]) has recently been recognized as one of the key technologies that has attracted treme”
• Full-Duplex Communication for ISAC: Joint Beamforming and Power Optimization (2022, background): “Meanwhile from the radar perspective, the sensing is continuously performed at the BS occupying all the available channel bands such that an enhanced radar performance is achieved [5], [21], [24].”
• Joint Transmit Waveform and Passive Beamforming Design for RIS-Aided DFRC Systems (2021, background): “Thus, there is a consensus that future 6G networks should provide both communication and sensing services, which motivates the recent research theme of integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) [30]-[32].”
• A Tutorial on Near-Field XL-MIMO Communications Toward 6G (2023, neutral): “In particular, the unprecedented spatial resolution of XL-MIMO and ISAC endow the transmitter/receiver with the capability of extracting the features of each multi-path, e.g., AoA/AoD, propagation delay, and Doppler frequency [226], [227].”
• Integrated Sensing and Communication Signals Toward 5G-A and 6G: A Survey (2023, methodology): “The application scenarios and key technologies of ISAC are summarized in [5] and [23].”