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Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

Could you elaborate on what exactly "integrated communications and sensing" is and why it's so important here. I tried to do some quick reading but I failed to find any good high level overview of what it is. Most of what I was able to find seemed like academic research papers around beam-forming.

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It's an approach to wireless engineering aiming to make it much easier for sensing and communications applications to use the same spectrum simultaneously. There are so many papers on the topic and some of them are more technical but a lot are focused on possible applications. The name "ISAC" is kind of an umbrella term to describe a bunch of different approaches both old and new.

For the passive sensing applications you can mix and match these keywords in Google scholar:

"Device free", "gait recognition", "passive", "localization", "identification", "activity recognition"

For example: "device free localization" is a keyword for papers about tracking people who don't have phones. Another similar one would be "passive identification". You might also try "adversarial localization".

See this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.11457

And check this out: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1812720569488179637...

Some of these papers are more than a decade old, and are written about standard WiFi hardware. So for researchers this kind of stuff is old news.

WiFi radiation makes a great source of illumination for sensing applications.

The status from 3 years ago was already pretty scary.

https://web.ece.ucsb.edu/~ymostofi/IdentificationThroughWall...

Wow, this is equally fascinating and frightening. Is it correct to say Cross-Modal-ID is an application of "integrated communications and sensing" technology then? Am I understanding relationship correctly?

I'd say that's a good way of putting it, though the way I understand it is that "integrated sensing and communication" is an engineering approach intended to facilitate more applications like this and to push them to the theoretical limits. The main reason being to help communication and sensing applications coexist in the same spectrum.

Thanks, that helps as do your two links above. Cheers.

This paradigm shift appears to be driven in part by the increasing congestion of the sub-6 GHz frequency bands. Integrated communications and sensing devices should be able to share spectrum.

Prior threads on Wi-Fi 7 Sensing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33758434

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