Architecture for cellular enabled integrated communication and sensing services

• Published in: China communications Vol. 20; no. 9; pp. 59 - 77
• Main Authors: Liu, Bo, Zhang, Qixun, Jiang, Zheng, Xue, Dongsheng, Xu, Chenlong, Wang, Bowen, She, Xiaoming, Peng, Jinlin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: China Institute of Communications 01.09.2023; China Telecom Corporation Limited Beijing Research Institute,Beijing 102209,China%School of Information and Communication Engineering,Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications,Beijing 100876,China%China Telecom Corporation Limited Beijing Research Institute,Beijing 102209,China%Artificial Intelligence Research Center,National Innovation Institute of Defense Technology,Beijing,China; School of Information and Communication Engineering,Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications,Beijing 100876,China
• Subjects: 5G mobile communication; 5G system; Autonomous aerial vehicles; Hardware; integrated sensing and communication (ISAC); Low latency communication; Monitoring; network architecture; Roads; Sensors; network architecture; integrated sensing and communication(ISAC); 5G system
• ISSN: 1673-5447
• DOI: 10.23919/JCC.fa.2023-0155.202309

There is growing interest in the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) to extend the 5G+/6G network capabilities by introducing sensing capability. While the solutions for mono-static or bi-static ISAC have shown feasibility and benefits based on existing 5G physical layer design, whether and how to coordinate multiple ISAC devices to better exert networking performance are rarely discussed. 3 rd Partnership Project (3GPP) has initiated the ISAC use cases study, and the follow-up studies for network architecture could be anticipated. In this article, we focus on gNB-based sensing mode and propose ISAC functional framework with given of highlevel service procedures to enable cellular based ISAC services. In the proposed ISAC framework, three types of network functions for sensing service as Sensing Function (SF), lightweight-Edge Sensing Function (ESF) and full-version-ESF are designed with interaction with network nodes to fulfill the latency requirements of ISAC use cases. Finally, with simulation evaluations and hardware testbed results, we further verify the performance benefit and feasibility to enable ISAC in 5G for the gNB-based sensing mode with new design on SF and related signaling protocols.