Convergent Communication, Sensing and Localization in 6G Systems: An Overview of Technologies, Opportunities and Challenges

Herein, we focus on convergent 6G communication, localization and sensing systems by identifying key technology enablers, discussing their underlying challenges, implementation issues, and recommending potential solutions. Moreover, we discuss exciting new opportunities for integrated localization and sensing applications, which will disrupt traditional design principles and revolutionize the way we live, interact with our environment, and do business. Regarding potential enabling technologies, 6G will continue to develop towards even higher frequency ranges, wider bandwidths, and massive antenna arrays. In turn, this will enable sensing solutions with very fine range, Doppler, and angular resolutions, as well as localization to cm-level degree of accuracy. Besides, new materials, device types, and reconfigurable surfaces will allow network operators to reshape and control the electromagnetic response of the environment. At the same time, machine learning and artificial intelligence will leverage the unprecedented availability of data and computing resources to tackle the biggest and hardest problems in wireless communication systems. As a result, 6G will be truly intelligent wireless systems that will provide not only ubiquitous communication but also empower high accuracy localization and high-resolution sensing services. They will become the catalyst for this revolution by bringing about a unique new set of features and service capabilities, where localization and sensing will coexist with communication, continuously sharing the available resources in time, frequency, and space. This work concludes by highlighting foundational research challenges, as well as implications and opportunities related to privacy, security, and trust

Convergent communication, sensing and localization in 6g systems: An overview of technologies, opportunities and challenges

Herein, we focus on convergent 6G communication, localization and sensing systems by identifying key technology enablers, discussing their underlying challenges, implementation issues, and recommending potential solutions. Moreover, we discuss exciting new opportunities for integrated localization and sensing applications, which will disrupt traditional design principles and revolutionize the way we live, interact with our environment, and do business. Regarding potential enabling technologies, 6G will continue to develop towards even higher frequency ranges, wider bandwidths, and massive antenna arrays. In turn, this will enable sensing solutions with very fine range, Doppler, and angular resolutions, as well as localization to cm-level degree of accuracy. Besides, new materials, device types, and reconfigurable surfaces will allow network operators to reshape and control the electromagnetic response of the environment. At the same time, machine learning and artificial intelligence will leverage the unprecedented availability of data and computing resources to tackle the biggest and hardest problems in wireless communication systems. As a result, 6G will be truly intelligent wireless systems that will provide not only ubiquitous communication but also empower high accuracy localization and high-resolution sensing services. They will become the catalyst for this revolution by bringing about a unique new set of features and service capabilities, where localization and sensing will coexist with communication, continuously sharing the available resources in time, frequency, and space. This work concludes by highlighting foundational research challenges, as well as implications and opportunities related to privacy, security, and trust

A Comprehensive Overview on 5G-and-Beyond Networks with UAVs: From Communications to Sensing and Intelligence

Due to the advancements in cellular technologies and the dense deployment of cellular infrastructure, integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) into the fifth-generation (5G) and beyond cellular networks is a promising solution to achieve safe UAV operation as well as enabling diversified applications with mission-specific payload data delivery. In particular, 5G networks need to support three typical usage scenarios, namely, enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC), and massive machine-type communications (mMTC). On the one hand, UAVs can be leveraged as cost-effective aerial platforms to provide ground users with enhanced communication services by exploiting their high cruising altitude and controllable maneuverability in three-dimensional (3D) space. On the other hand, providing such communication services simultaneously for both UAV and ground users poses new challenges due to the need for ubiquitous 3D signal coverage as well as the strong air-ground network interference. Besides the requirement of high-performance wireless communications, the ability to support effective and efficient sensing as well as network intelligence is also essential for 5G-and-beyond 3D heterogeneous wireless networks with coexisting aerial and ground users. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the latest research efforts on integrating UAVs into cellular networks, with an emphasis on how to exploit advanced techniques (e.g., intelligent reflecting surface, short packet transmission, energy harvesting, joint communication and radar sensing, and edge intelligence) to meet the diversified service requirements of next-generation wireless systems. Moreover, we highlight important directions for further investigation in future work.Comment: Accepted by IEEE JSA

Conceptualisation of human-on-the-loop haptic teleoperation with fully autonomous self-driving vehicles in the urban environment

The automotive industry aims to deploy commercial level-5 fully autonomous self-driving vehicles (FA-SDVs) in a diverse range of benefit-driven concepts on city roads in the years to come. In all future visions of operating networks of FA-SDVs, humans are expected to intervene with some kind of remote supervisory role. Recent advances in cyber-physical systems (CPS) within the concept of Internet of Everything (IoE) using tactile internet (TI) teleport us to teleoperate remote objects within the cyber-world. Human-on-the-loop (HOTL) haptic teleoperation with an extension of human control and sensing capability by coupling with artificial sensors and actuators with an increased sense of real-time driving in the remote vehicle can help overcome the challenging tasks when the new driver - artificial intelligence (AI) agent - encounters an unorthodox situation that can't be addressed by the autonomous capabilities. This paper analyses HOTL real-time haptic delay-sensitive teleoperation with FA-SDVs, in the aspects of human-vehicle teamwork by establishing two similar remote parallel worlds --- real-world vehicle time-varying environment and cyber-world emulation of this environment, i.e., digital twins (DTs) --- in which a human telesupervisor (HTS), as a biological agent, can be immersed within a reasonable timescale with no cybersickness enabling omnipresence and a bidirectional flow of energy and information. The experiments conducted as a proof of concept of HOTL haptic teleoperation shows promising results and the potential of benefiting from the proposed framework

A Survey on Applications of Cache-Aided NOMA

Contrary to orthogonal multiple-access (OMA), non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) schemes can serve a pool of users without exploiting the scarce frequency or time domain resources. This is useful in meeting the future network requirements (5G and beyond systems), such as, low latency, massive connectivity, users' fairness, and high spectral efficiency. On the other hand, content caching restricts duplicate data transmission by storing popular contents in advance at the network edge which reduces data traffic. In this survey, we focus on cache-aided NOMA-based wireless networks which can reap the benefits of both cache and NOMA; switching to NOMA from OMA enables cache-aided networks to push additional files to content servers in parallel and improve the cache hit probability. Beginning with fundamentals of the cache-aided NOMA technology, we summarize the performance goals of cache-aided NOMA systems, present the associated design challenges, and categorize the recent related literature based on their application verticals. Concomitant standardization activities and open research challenges are highlighted as well

Facilitating Internet of Things on the Edge

The evolution of electronics and wireless technologies has entered a new era, the Internet of Things (IoT). Presently, IoT technologies influence the global market, bringing benefits in many areas, including healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, and entertainment. Modern IoT devices serve as a thin client with data processing performed in a remote computing node, such as a cloud server or a mobile edge compute unit. These computing units own significant resources that allow prompt data processing. The user experience for such an approach relies drastically on the availability and quality of the internet connection. In this case, if the internet connection is unavailable, the resulting operations of IoT applications can be completely disrupted. It is worth noting that emerging IoT applications are even more throughput demanding and latency-sensitive which makes communication networks a practical bottleneck for the service provisioning. This thesis aims to eliminate the limitations of wireless access, via the improvement of connectivity and throughput between the devices on the edge, as well as their network identification, which is fundamentally important for IoT service management. The introduction begins with a discussion on the emerging IoT applications and their demands. Subsequent chapters introduce scenarios of interest, describe the proposed solutions and provide selected performance evaluation results. Specifically, we start with research on the use of degraded memory chips for network identification of IoT devices as an alternative to conventional methods, such as IMEI; these methods are not vulnerable to tampering and cloning. Further, we introduce our contributions for improving connectivity and throughput among IoT devices on the edge in a case where the mobile network infrastructure is limited or totally unavailable. Finally, we conclude the introduction with a summary of the results achieved

Localization as a Key Enabler of 6G Wireless Systems: A Comprehensive Survey and an Outlook

peer reviewedWhen fully implemented, sixth generation (6G) wireless systems will constitute intelligent wireless networks that enable not only ubiquitous communication but also high-Accuracy localization services. They will be the driving force behind this transformation by introducing a new set of characteristics and service capabilities in which location will coexist with communication while sharing available resources. To that purpose, this survey investigates the envisioned applications and use cases of localization in future 6G wireless systems, while analyzing the impact of the major technology enablers. Afterwards, system models for millimeter wave, terahertz and visible light positioning that take into account both line-of-sight (LOS) and non-LOS channels are presented, while localization key performance indicators are revisited alongside mathematical definitions. Moreover, a detailed review of the state of the art conventional and learning-based localization techniques is conducted. Furthermore, the localization problem is formulated, the wireless system design is considered and the optimization of both is investigated. Finally, insights that arise from the presented analysis are summarized and used to highlight the most important future directions for localization in 6G wireless systems