Integrated Sensing and Communications: Toward Dual-Functional Wireless Networks for 6G and Beyond

By Fan Liu, Yuanhao Cui, Christos Masouros, Jie Xu, Tony X. Han, Yonina C. Eldar, Stefano Buzzi. IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2021

3,717 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As the standardization of 5G solidifies, researchers are speculating what 6G will be. The integration of sensing functionality is emerging as a key feature of the 6G Radio Access Network (RAN), allowing for the exploitation of dense cell infrastructures to construct a perceptive network. In this IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC) Special Issue overview, we provide a comprehensive review on the background, range of key applications and state-of-the-art approaches of Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC). We commence by discussing the interplay between sensing and communications (S&C) from a historical point of view, and then consider the multiple facets of ISAC and the resulting performance gains. By introducing both ongoing and potential use cases, we shed light on the industrial progress and standardization activities related to ISAC. We analyze a number of performance tradeoffs between S&C, spanning from information theoretical limits to physical layer performance tradeoffs, and the cross-layer design tradeoffs. Next, we discuss the signal processing aspects of ISAC, namely ISAC waveform design and receive signal processing. As a step further, we provide our vision on the deeper integration between S&C within the framework of perceptive networks, where the two functionalities are expected to mutually assist each other, i.e., via communication-assisted sensing and sensing-assisted communications. Finally, we identify the potential integration of ISAC with other emerging communication technologies, and their positive impacts on the future of wireless networks.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a5614b4fdde1762e42b0881cf6c0679351425ddd

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Citations in the corpus

A Tutorial on Near-Field XL-MIMO Communications Toward 6G (2023, neutral): “In this context, several promising 6G candidate technologies have been proposed, such as extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) [8]–[11], ISAC [12], and Terahertz (THz) communications [13], [14].”
Evolution of NOMA Toward Next Generation Multiple Access (NGMA) for 6G (2021, background): “provides new sensing capabilities and reduces the weight of the equipment in current wireless networks [124], [125].”
Joint Maneuver and Beamforming Design for UAV-Enabled Integrated Sensing and Communication (2021, background): “, [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10]).”
Integrated Sensing and Communications: Recent Advances and Ten Open Challenges (2023, methodology): “In this way, both the user equipment and cellular network can sense the surroundings and enable a variety of applications such as environmental monitoring and target detection.”
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]–[5].”
Covert Communications: A Comprehensive Survey (2023, background): “W ITH the boosting of terminal devices in the ﬁfth generation (5G) and the upcoming sixth generation (6G) wireless communications, the modern society is getting more and more reliant on information transmission [1], [2], [3].”
5G-Advanced Toward 6G: Past, Present, and Future (2023, background): “and hardware resource sharing or information sharing [233].”
A Tutorial on Fluid Antenna System for 6G Networks: Encompassing Communication Theory, Optimization Methods and Hardware Designs (2024, background): “Finally, ISAC makes up the last new usage scenario, aiming to facilitate applications and services requiring sensing capabilities such as movement tracking, environmental monitoring, and providing sensing data or information for AI, extended reality, and digital twin applications [15], [16].”
A Tutorial on Environment-Aware Communications via Channel Knowledge Map for 6G (2023, background): “Besides, during the CKM utilization phase, ISAC can be an efficient way to sense or localize the device and/or scatterer, so that the corresponding a priori channel knowledge can be efficiently learned in CKM.”
Flexible-Antenna Systems: A Pinching-Antenna Perspective (2024, neutral): “This is particularly true given the fact that various integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) techniques can be exploited for accurate localization [23].”
Cramér-Rao Bound Optimization for Joint Radar-Communication Beamforming (2021, background): “Indeed, in many location-aware services and applications, sensing and communications are recognized as a pair of intertwined functionalities, which are often required to operate simultaneously [3]–[5].”
Optimal Transmit Beamforming for Integrated Sensing and Communication (2021, background): “Towards this end, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC)1 [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18] has recently attracted growing research interests in both academia and industry, in which the radar sensing capabilities are integrated into wir”
UAV-Enabled Integrated Sensing and Communication: Opportunities and Challenges (2022, methodology): “links to long-range targets which lead to seriously degraded sensing performance [3], [4].”
The Integrated Sensing and Communication Revolution for 6G: Vision, Techniques, and Applications (2024, neutral): “The computation capabilities will vary significantly at these 678 P ROCEEDINGS OF THE IEEE | Vol. 112, No. 7”
Full-Duplex Communication for ISAC: Joint Beamforming and Power Optimization (2022, background): “It has been shown in the literature [4], [5], [6] that ISAC significantly enhances the spectral efficiency and reduces implemental cost by sharing spectral resources and reusing expensive hardware architectures.”