Integrating Sensing and Communication for IoT Systems: Task-Oriented Control Perspective

The Internet of Things (IoT) is widely acknowledged as an innovative paradigm that engenders profound alterations along with society's development due to its inevitability and universality. To effectively control IoT systems for specific tasks, it is important to tackle their emerging challenges, such as information transmission and sensing for the environment or specific task. Integrating sensing and communication (ISAC), which achieves the communication and sensing functionalities over one hardware platform, has significant advantages over dedicated sensing and communication, and has been regarded as a key technique for IoT ecosystems with the upcoming 6G communication revolution. Bearing this in mind, we provide an overview of ISAC-enabled IoT systems in terms of their framework and key technologies. In particular, we first give a basic introduction to control systems, which guides the design of our considered system structure. Then, ISAC and other enabling technologies are illustrated to facilitate our proposed system. Benefiting from the communication and sensing functionalities, our proposed ISAC-enabled IoT systems enable task-oriented control. Future challenges and directions for more efficient task-oriented IoT are also discussed.