As the standardization of 5G has gradually been solidified, researchers have speculated what 6G will be. A common theme in many perspectives is that 6G Radio Access Network (RAN) should serve as edge infrastructure to provide site-specific services for surrounding users, rather than communication-only functionality. Jointly suggested by recent advances from the signal processing society and the communications society, radio sensing functionality can be integrated into 6G RAN in a cheap and fast manner. Therefore, the future cellular network could image and measure the surrounding environment to enable advanced location-aware services, ranging from the physical layer (e.g., fast and training-free beam alignment) to application layers (e.g., city-wide weather monitoring, mmWave-specified). This type of research is typically referred to as Integrated Sensing And Communication (ISAC).

In essence, ISAC can acquire two main advantages over dedicated sensing and communication functionalities: 1) Integration gain to efficiently utilize congested resources for dual use of both communications and sensing, and even more interesting, 2) Coordination gain to balance dual-functional performance or/and perform mutual assistance. That is, via the shared use of spectrum and hardware resources, ISAC can be realized through a synergistic design to pursue the integration gain, e.g., cohabitation strategies with interference management. Moreover, it can also be implemented from a co-design perspective, wherein the communications and sensing functionalities are simultaneously performed via unified waveform to optimize the performance to acquire the coordination gain jointly. Benefiting from these two advantages, applications of ISAC have been extended to numerous emerging areas, including vehicular networks, environmental monitoring, Internet of Things, as well as in-door services such as human activity recognition.

Despite having drawn huge attention from both academia and industry, many open problems still remain to be investigated. This workshop aims at bringing together researchers from academia and industry to identify and discuss the major technical challenges, recent breakthroughs, and novel applications related to ISAC..

IEEE Communications Society Integrated Sensing and Communication Emerging Technology Initiative

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