Cooperative ISAC Networks: Opportunities and Challenges

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of cooperative ISAC networks in 6G, addressing challenges like limited coverage and interference by proposing new metrics, cooperation strategies, and architectures to enhance sensing and communication integration.

Contribution

It introduces new considerations, metrics, and cooperation regimes for network-level ISAC, along with architectures and research directions to improve sensing and communication integration.

Findings

Enhanced S&C coverage through multi-cell cooperation

New metrics for evaluating ISAC performance

Identification of promising cooperation architectures

Abstract

The integration of sensing and communication (ISAC) emerges as a cornerstone technology for the forth upcoming sixth generation era, seamlessly incorporating sensing functionality into wireless networks as a native capability. The main challenges in efficient ISAC are constituted by its limited sensing and communication coverage, as well as severe inter-cell interference. Network-level ISAC relying on multi-cell cooperation is capable of effectively expanding both the sensing and communication (S&C) coverage and of providing extra degrees of freedom (DoF) for realizing increased integration gains between S&C. In this work, we provide new considerations for ISAC networks, including new metrics, the optimization of the DoF, cooperation regimes, and highlight new S&C tradeoffs. Then, we discuss a suite of cooperative S&C architectures both at the task, as well as data, and signal levels. Furthermore, the interplay between S&C at the network level is investigated and promising research directions are outlined.