Toward Joint Radar, Communication, Computation, Localization, and Sensing in IoT

Since the 1960s, joint sensing and communication (JSAC) has been proposed as an attractive technique with advantages of enhanced spectral and hardware efficiency along with low latency. However, in those old days, complex transceiver designs hindered the massive adoption of JSAC in many applications. Nevertheless, thanks to advancing wireless technologies in recent years, JSAC has recently attracted substantial attention for a wide range of civil and military applications. In particular, JSAC enables simultaneous sensing and communication functionalities with the full cooperation of both operations in shared resources such as hardware as well as radio resources (i.e., frequency, time, space and so on). Note that sensing functionality is associated with other sub-functionalities of radio-detection-and-ranging (Radar), computation, and localization which are sporadically used terms in the literature. Thus, to generalize the concept and avoid any confusion, we use the term “sensing” in the acronym JSAC as a consistent and general term associated with the other aforementioned sub-functionalities. This paper elaborates on defining sensing and communication operations and then, provides an overview with preliminaries, key latest findings, and state-of-the-art of JSAC. It also explores both existing and emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications of JSAC. Next, it provides a new classification of JSAC technologies by taking into account not only the existing JSAC technologies but also a diverse range of technologies that allow JSAC to be used for various types of IoT applications. Eventually, this study projects future research directions and challenges of enabling JSAC in IoT.