Integrated Radio Sensing Capabilities for 6G Networks: AI/ML Perspective

TL;DR

This paper surveys AI and ML techniques to enhance radio sensing in 6G networks, covering various sensing applications within integrated sensing and communication, and discusses challenges and future directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive tutorial and review of AI/ML approaches for diverse radio sensing tasks in 6G, expanding the sensing scope beyond radar to include localization and spectrum sensing.

Findings

AI/ML significantly improve sensing accuracy and efficiency.

Integrated sensing and communication enable multimodal, multi-task networks.

Challenges include data scarcity, complexity, and real-time processing requirements.

Abstract

The sixth-generation wireless communications (6G) is often labeled as "connected intelligence". Radio sensing, aligned with machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), promises, among other benefits, breakthroughs in the system's ability to perceive the environment and effectively utilize this awareness. This article offers a tutorial-style survey of AI and ML approaches to enhance the sensing capabilities of next-generation wireless networks. To this end, while staying in the framework of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), we expand the term "sensing" from radar, via spectrum sensing, to miscellaneous applications of radio sensing like non-cooperative transmitter localization. We formulate the problems, explain the state-of-the-art approaches, and detail AI-based techniques to tackle various objectives in the context of wireless sensing. We discuss the advantages, enablers, and challenges of integrating various sensing capabilities into an envisioned AI-powered multimodal multi-task network. In addition to the tutorial-style core of this work based on direct authors' involvement in 6G research problems, we review the related literature, and provide both a good start for those entering this field of research, and a topical overview for a general reader with a background in wireless communications