Integrated Human Activity Sensing and Communications

Advances in wireless communication and signal processing facilitate integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) – a compelling technology that intrinsically combines sensing and communication functionalities for the dual-purpose exploitation of wireless/hardware resources and pursues mutual benefits. Consequently, the next-generation communications network will be perceptive. In this article, we provide a review of human-related sensing in the context of ISAC. We first present a general ISAC receiver signal processing framework, with a focus on human activity recognition (HAR). Based on its specific spatial deployments, we then categorize ISAC HAR into monostatic, bi-static, and distributed deployments, and discuss their properties, critical research problems and solutions. To facilitate the system's realization and improve its recognition performance, we then explore the inherent connections between the physical-layer system parameters and HAR performance metrics. Experimental results are presented for characterizing the sensing potentials of different ISAC systems. Finally, we review the technical challenges and identify the open research problems.