Over-the-Air Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computation in IoT Networks

To facilitate the development of Internet of Things (IoT) services, tremendous IoT devices are deployed in the wireless network to collect and pass data to the server for further processing. Aiming at improving the data sensing and delivering efficiency, the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technique has been proposed to design dual-functional signals for both radar sensing and data communication. To accelerate the data processing, the function computation via signal transmission is enabled by over-the-air computation (AirComp), which is based on the analog-wave addition property in a multi-access channel. As a natural combination, the emerging technology namely over-the-air integrated sensing, communication, and computation (Air-ISCC) adopts both the promising performances of ISAC and AirComp to improve the spectrum efficiency and reduce latency by enabling simultaneous sensing, communication, and computation. In this article, we provide a promptly overview of Air-ISCC by introducing the fundamentals, discussing the advanced techniques, and identifying the applications.