Integrated Sensing and Communications on the Road to 6G
Tuesday, 3 June 2025, 9:00 – 12:30, room 1.F
Speaker:
- Christos Masouros (Univ. College London, UK)
- Kaitao Meng (Univ. College London, UK)
- Kawon Han (Univ. College London, UK)
Motivation and Context
The tutorial introduces Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) as a transformative technology for future wireless networks, merging sensing and communication into a single framework. This integration is pivotal for emerging applications such as smart cities, urban security, smart mobility, and infrastructure monitoring, where next-generation networks must meet stringent 6G requirements, ultra-high data rates, precise localization, low latency, and energy efficiency. The tutorial begins by exploring ISAC signal design at the physical layer, outlining techniques that enable spectrum reuse and interference exploitation. It then moves to network-level optimization, discussing advanced concepts like Cell-free and distributed massive MIMO, cooperative frameworks, and innovative performance metrics. These topics are further expanded in the context of distributed ISAC systems, where cooperative sensing, synchronization, and secure signaling are highlighted as key to enhancing network scalability and sustainability. A notable aspect of the tutorial is its focus on leveraging interference as a beneficial resource rather than a hindrance. By intentionally introducing and exploiting constructive interference, the proposed framework aims to reduce hardware complexity and cost, while promoting a unified approach to spectrum and hardware utilization. This holistic view extends from single-cell designs to comprehensive network-level strategies, incorporating coordinated cell association, collaborative data fusion, and joint cooperative sensing and communication arrangements. This tutorial reflects the growing interest from leading industry players such as Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia, and others. It aims to stimulate further research and discussion on ISAC, paving the way for innovative solutions in future B5G and 6G networks, particularly for applications like perceptive cellular networks, Wi-Fi sensing, and intelligent transportation.
Structure and Content
9:00 – 9:50: Part 1: ISAC Signalling Design – Christos Masouros
This part focuses on the new research stream of integrated sensing and communications, incorporating spectrum sharing and management to optimize the use of limited radio resources. This aims to enable the rescue of radio hardware for both communications and sensing, to support a multifunctional wireless network. This will reduce the energy and spectrum demand for the separate sensing and communication applications, reduce the silicon demand through the unification of sensing and communication devices, along with the associated electronic waste. This part is structured as follows:
- Motivation: emerging wireless applications demanding ISAC and the potential for a sustainable provision
- Signalling design: Sensing/Communication-Centric shared spectrum ISAC Designs
- Signalling design: Joint waveform design for ISAC, beamforming ISAC designs, pareto framework, and hardware efficient ISAC
- Hardware-efficient spectrum management and signalling design for ISAC
- Security challenges and opportunities for ISAC, and state of the art secure ISAC techniques
- Sensing-Assisted Communication security
- ISAC on a network level, through the eyes of stochastic geometry
- Vehicular applications: Sensing-Assisted predictive beamforming design for vehicular networks
- Experimentation and proof-of-concept results
- Future work on interference exploitation – open problems
9:50 – 10:40: Part 2: Network level optimization for ISAC – Kaitao Meng
This section aims to enhance network-level ISAC by extending multicell ISAC signal design and spectrum allocation, introducing new performance metrics such as joint area spectral efficiency and outage probability to improve spectrum efficiency, service quality, and coverage. Additionally, it explores resource constraints, trade-offs, and cooperative frameworks at task, data, and signal levels, along with antenna resource and deployment optimization, providing insights for future efficient network resource management.
- Extensions to ISAC signal design and spectrum allocation tailored for multicell ISAC.
- New performance metrics: Joint area spectral efficiency and outage probability.
- Enhancing spectrum efficiency, service quality and coverage probability.
- New trade-offs resources in ISAC networks.
- Resource constraints related to backhaul capacity and cooperative clusters.
- Cooperative frameworks at task, data, and signal levels for efficient spectrum utilization.
- Performance analysis for network sensing and network communication.
- Antenna resource and deployment optimization for ISAC networks.
- Future research on efficient network resource management.
Coffee break
11:10 – 12:00: Part 3: Distributed ISAC: Signaling, Synchronization, and Coherency – Kawon Han
This section focuses on the distributed ISAC system, where multiple distributed nodes (or arrays) collaborate to perform sensing and communication. We analyze key aspects of D-ISAC design, including transmit signaling strategies, phase coherency, synchronization, and the effects of phase noise, demonstrating the systematic advantages of D-ISAC over single-node systems. Also, it explores the remaining challenges and potential directions for future research in the field, including ISAC security.
- Motivation: collocated ISAC to distributed ISAC in next-generation wireless networks.
- Cooperative sensing and communication: joint target localization and coordinated multipoint
- Signalling design for noncoherent distributed ISAC: system model, signalling, and performance gain
- Signalling design for coherent distributed ISAC: system model, signalling, and performance gain
- Sensing and communication performance trade-off in asynchronous distributed ISAC
- Wireless time-frequency synchronization technique for distributed ISAC
- Effects of phase noise and its mitigation in distributed ISAC
- Challenges in sensing security in ISAC: passive radar eavesdropper
- Future direction and remaining challenges on coherent cooperation
12:00 – 12:30: Part 4: Summary and Q&A
