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.