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integrated sensing and communications (ISAC)

Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) uses radio signals to simultaneously convey communication data and provide sensing information about the environment. ISAC systems can utilize the radio signals transmitted and received by network elements, as well as the reflections, and scattering of radio waves, to sense and better understand the physical world. This capability can provide a broad range of new services, such as high-accuracy localization, gesture capturing, activity recognition, and passive object detection.

The concept of ISAC combines sensing and communication functionalities into a single system.

ISAC has two main advantages over dedicated sensing and communication functionalities:

Integration Gain: This refers to the efficient utilization of congested resources. By integrating sensing and communication into a single system, ISAC can make better use of available resources, reducing the need for separate systems for each function.
Coordination Gain: This refers to the ability to balance dual-functional performance or perform mutual assistance. For example, sensing information can be used to enhance communication performance, and vice versa.

ISAC can enable many new services that mobile communication system operators can offer. These include very high accuracy positioning, localization and tracking, imaging for biomedical and security applications, simultaneous localization and mapping to automatically construct maps of complex indoor or outdoor environments, pollution or natural disaster monitoring, and gesture and activity recognition.

The implementation of ISAC faces several challenges, such as interference cancellation. Network-delivered real-time AI can help solve these challenges, applying continuous inferencing and fine-tuning the model based on conditions changing in the physical world data.