Use Cases for ISAC in 6G: A Look Ahead

A recent ETSI report, Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC); Use Cases and Deployment Scenarios, outlines 18 compelling use cases for ISAC in 6G, each with distinct requirements and deployment contexts. As chair of the ETSI ISAC industry specification group that developed this report, I’d like to highlight a few high-impact applications that illustrate why ISAC is poised to become an exciting feature of 6G.

ISAC converges sensing and wireless communication capabilities to empower devices—including base stations, smartphones, and vehicles—with radar-like abilities to detect, interpret, and react to their surroundings. While some early ISAC features are beginning to emerge in 5G-Advanced, the real transformation will unfold with 6G as ISAC enhances both network efficiency and intelligence and the end user experience.

At a high level, ISAC is being designed to improve network performance and deliver “beyond communication” capabilities that enable devices to sense their environments and adapt communication accordingly, delivering personalized, context-aware services across a variety of usage scenarios.

Mobile Devices: Seamless Connectivity Across Dynamic Environments

ISAC will dramatically enhance how mobile devices perform across complex and variable environments. Consider a smartphone user streaming video on a train through a city. ISAC allows the network to dynamically sense obstructions like buildings, trees, or other terrain and adjust proactively beamforming strategies in real-time to maintain seamless connectivity. As ETSI notes, “urban areas or complex terrain pose challenges in establishing unobstructed Line of Sight (LoS) communication.” Through real-time environmental sensing, ISAC optimizes both user experience and network resource allocation.

Connected Vehicles: Elevating Automotive Intelligence

The automotive sector is enthusiastic about the potential for ISAC because vehicles today rely on a plethora of sensors for functions like adaptive cruise control, lane monitoring, and collision avoidance. ISAC would enable these sensing capabilities to be enhanced by the cellular network, providing a larger scale and more reliable layer of environmental awareness.

Beyond enhancing safety and navigation, whether for human-operated or autonomous vehicles, ISAC introduces a powerful opportunity for data-driven innovation. Vehicles will generate large volumes of sensing data, which can be anonymized and leveraged to train AI models for services across traffic management, urban planning, and more. These models themselves can become monetizable assets, offering new revenue streams for service providers and equipment manufacturers.

Immersive Media & Consumer Electronics: Redefining Real-Time Experiences

ISAC also plays a critical role in next-generation immersive experiences. Head-mounted displays (HMDs), augmented reality (AR) glasses, and haptic wearables will increasingly depend on precise spatial and environmental sensing to deliver low-latency, context-aware interactions.

In 6G-enabled immersive environments, ISAC will support sensor fusion—integrating input from device-based sensors and network-based sensing capabilities to deliver a richer, more synchronized user experience. From gesture recognition to object tracking, ISAC enables an adaptive and highly personalized digital interface that blurs the line between physical and virtual.

Digital Twinning: Powering Industry 4.0 with Real-Time Insight

Digital twins, or virtual replicas of physical assets or systems, are foundational for Industry 4.0 innovation, and ISAC contributes to these digital renderings in two key ways. First, ISAC supports the development of physical environment twins, such as a digitally mirrored smart factory where autonomous mobile robots and machinery operate more efficiently by leveraging network-based sensing for obstacle avoidance, route optimization, and remote control.

Separately, ISAC can enhance the accuracy of network twins, which create digital replicas of the wireless network and allow operators to simulate, test, and optimize changes in a virtual environment before implementing them in the real world. This can dramatically reduce downtime, improve reliability, and optimize performance by enabling AI model validation, predictive maintenance, and dynamic reconfiguration based on real-time data.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: Enhancing Public Safety and Operational Reach

ISAC’s integration into UAV systems unlocks powerful capabilities in public safety, disaster response, and remote infrastructure monitoring. In the aftermath of a natural disaster, for instance, ISAC-enabled drones could survey affected areas, detect survivors, and coordinate rescue operations—all while providing critical communications coverage.

Moreover, ISAC strengthens UAV telemetry, navigation, and collision avoidance, enhancing operational safety in increasingly congested airspaces. By embedding sensing into the network infrastructure, UAVs can operate with greater awareness and coordination, making them far more reliable tools for emergency response and environmental mapping. 

Enabling Smarter, Greener Networks

One of ISAC’s most important contributions may be its ability to make wireless networks more efficient. By enabling the network to “see” its environment, ISAC allows for real-time beam steering and MIMO optimization, reducing redundant transmissions and enhancing spectrum utilization.

This leads to tangible improvements in energy efficiency—networks that use fewer resources, cost less to operate, and offer higher performance. Those efficiencies can be reinvested to further elevate the user experience or support new services, helping operators meet growing demands sustainably.

Looking Ahead

The foundational work being done through ETSI is helping to shape the future of ISAC in 6G. As research matures and deployment scenarios become clearer, we at InterDigital are excited by the opportunities ISAC presents—not just for innovation, but for meaningful transformation across sectors.

To learn more about the ISAC use cases and requirements being explored for 6G, we encourage you to join this ETSI webinar on June 27th at 11:00 CEST. Register here.

Integrating Sensing and Communications: A Key Building Block for 6G

<p>As their name suggests, telecommunications networks have been traditionally designed only for communications purposes, carrying voice traffic and different types of data used for communication. On the other hand, sensors, like radar, are treated as a different type of technology meaning different networks carried sensor-related data. While the principles of communication and sensing are long-established, they are on the verge of a large-scale shift as the integration of the two will be a landmark in the wireless evolution toward 6G.</p>
<p>Imagine what might be possible if your handheld cell phone was also a radar device. This technological evolution made possible by integrating sensing and communications would require innovations in the device itself and also in the network on which it operates.</p>
<p>Here we will explore the potential of what this new stage of evolution means.</p>
<p>Within the International Telecommunications Union (ITU)&rsquo;s emerging vision for 6G, known as known as IMT-2030, integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) is expected to be a new, revolutionary feature of 6G, alongside integrated AI and communication and ubiquitous connectivity, and more foundational enhancements like mMTC, URLLC, and eMBB. The ITU&rsquo;s vision is helping to guide industry groups and standards organizations, with 3GPP beginning to lay a foundation for this new technology capability in a Release 19 study item for the implementation of the pre-6G wireless standard, 5G Advanced. In fact, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) announced [<a href="https://portal.etsi.org/tb.aspx?tbid=912&amp;SubTB=912#/">https://portal.etsi.org/isac</a>] the establishment of a new InterDigital-chaired industry specification group to focus on ISAC.</p>
<h3><span style="color: #00aeef;"><strong><strong>What is ISAC?</strong></strong></span></h3>
<p>ISAC refers to the use of radio signals to &ldquo;sense&rdquo; or detect and identify various objects and surfaces within a surrounding environment. The radio network functions much like a radar, but in this scenario, it will be embedded into the network base station or user device instead of being an independent device with a distinct external data network.</p>
<p>The integration of sensing and communications will touch on nearly every aspect of system architecture, protocols, and radio access and will represent a major shift in the way communications systems and protocols are designed and implemented. Even today, industry is beginning to explore early ISAC in the telecommunications stack, focusing on system architecture, use cases, requirements, capabilities, and applications.</p>
<p>Historically, there have been early attempts to integrate sensing and communications, albeit in a more narrowly defined way. For example, some sensing capabilities were implemented in WLAN using the Wi-Fi signal, enabling a laptop with a Wi-Fi chip to be programmed to &ldquo;wake up&rdquo; when it sensed certain types of movement.</p>
<p>In 5G, industry began to use a 3GPP-standardized radio signal to achieve more accurate device positioning, which became a precursor to using radio signals for more sophisticated sensing.</p>
<p>Until recently, any sensing done using the communications network required the use of an external peripheral such as a LiDAR or a camera. The framework of the 3GPP standard assumed that sensing would be achieved using these external sources, but the shift toward ISAC will see the network become its own source of sensing. This evolution does not mean external sensors will become obsolete, but that the network and external sensors will complement each other.</p>
<p>Pre-standards groups like ETSI and its new ISAC ISG will do the important work to explore and forecast specific implementations of this technology, with each use case comprised of a mix of both external sensing and &ldquo;internal&rdquo; sensing done by the network itself. In one sensing scenario, there may be some object detection done by an external device capable of more accurately determining shape and characteristics, while the network monitors the detected object.</p>
<p>The massive amounts of data generated by external and network-based sensing will be made available to the network to enhance network operations or augment applications or services running on top of the network and is expected to empower greater network performance and application improvements.</p>
<h3><span style="color: #00aeef;"><strong><strong>Types of Sensing</strong></strong></span></h3>
<p>As ISAC is implemented, a few different sensing types will proliferate.</p>
<p>One common type is monostatic sensing, like radar, meaning the transmitter is in the same node as the receiver, and it transmits a signal and receives the echo. Alternatively, bistatic sensing refers to scenarios where the transmitter and receiver are different. In this sensing type, the transmitter sends a signal, which hits and reflects off a target, after which another node picks up the echo from that object to complete the sensing. There are many other more complex sensing types, such as multi-static sensing, which involves multiple nodes.</p>
<p>It remains to be seen which sensing type will be the most prevalent type in 3GPP specifications, but it will most likely be a configuration that has minimal impact on network design and configuration. Bistatic sensing may be the most appropriate starting place because of the relatively straightforward ability to use the base station as the transmitter and the user device as a receiver, or vice-versa.</p>
<h3><span style="color: #00aeef;"><strong><strong>Use Cases</strong></strong></span></h3>
<p>There are many exciting applications and use cases for this technology, many of which that will come into focus over time. For consumers, ISAC may help immersive media experiences like video conferencing become more realistic, because the user device will be capable of sensing more of the environment around the person you are conferencing with, supporting the creation of holographic images and more immersive interactions.</p>
<p>In an enterprise context, there are clear applications for use case like environmental monitoring, health monitoring, and intruder detection. Autonomous vehicles will also benefit greatly from the complementary nature of on-board and external sensing enabled by ISAC, alongside various cutting-edge connected enterprise use cases.</p>
<p>The ETSI ISAC ISG is excited to lead the exploration of these new opportunities and use cases, as well as the new infrastructure requirements to enable its success.</p>
<h3><span style="color: #00aeef;"><strong><strong>Looking Ahead</strong></strong></span></h3>
<p>ISAC is a truly future technology and will not likely have backward compatibility constraints because the approach will require new signals introduced in 6G whose structures and numerologies aren&rsquo;t part of the current 5G NR paradigm. ISAC will see its earliest standards considerations in 5G Advanced Release 19 introduced in early 2024 and throughout the development timeline for 6G.</p>
<p>3GPP has a mandate to help grow and mature this technology, in part because it revolutionizes the channel model, which historically consisted of a transmitter and a receiver. ISAC introduces a third node &mdash; the object to be sensed &mdash; which needs to be modeled within the 3GPP framework. This carries significant implications for the 3GPP channel model itself, and Release 19 will begin to address the early questions raised by this new technology.</p>
<p>Early working groups like ETSI&rsquo;s ISAC ISG will explore critical security, privacy, and sustainability considerations around ISAC, ensuring that the technology empowers a host of new capabilities but also addresses any problems this new ecosystem might create. As inaugural chair of the ISAC ISG, I remain eager and excited to better understand and pioneer the potential for this new feature of our evolving wireless network into our 6G future.</p>