Architecture for cellular enabled integrated communication and sensing services

Abstract

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.