Integrated Sensing and Communications: Background and Applications

In this chapter, we present the basic principles and recent advances in integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), which is identified to be one of the most promising technologies of the next-generation wireless networks. The subject of ISAC involves many aspects of wireless communications, signal processing, and mobile computing technologies, ranging from fundamental limits, advanced beamforming and precoding methods, new networking architectures and protocols, novel platforms, and more powerful computing and recognition algorithms, which will be elaborated one by one in the rest of this book. Prior to that, of particular importance in the development of ISAC is to identify “what is ISAC?”, “what are the underlying driving forces in ISAC?”, and “where ISAC may be applied?”. In this chapter, we aim to answer the above questions by overviewing the definition, driving forces, applications, as well as the standardization progress of ISAC.