Integration of Communication and Sensing in 6G: a Joint Industrial and Academic Perspective

TL;DR

This paper discusses the integration of communication, localization, and sensing in 6G, highlighting the Hexa-X project's goals to develop new radio technologies and high-resolution sensing for advanced use cases.

Contribution

It provides an overview of Hexa-X's vision, use cases, and technical enablers for integrating sensing and communication in 6G, outlining future research challenges.

Findings

Hexa-X aims to develop new radio access technologies.

Integration of sensing and communication enhances 6G capabilities.

Technical enablers are identified to bridge performance gaps.

Abstract

6G will likely be the first generation of mobile communication that will feature tight integration of localization and sensing with communication functionalities. Among several worldwide initiatives, the Hexa-X flagship project stands out as it brings together 25 key players from adjacent industries and academia, and has among its explicit goals to research fundamentally new radio access technologies and high-resolution localization and sensing. Such features will not only enable novel use cases requiring extreme localization performance, but also provide a means to support and improve communication functionalities. This paper provides an overview of the Hexa-X vision alongside the envisioned use cases. To close the required performance gap of these use cases with respect to 5G, several technical enablers will be discussed, together with the associated research challenges for the coming years.