The integration of sensing and communication would enable wireless networks to monitor the surrounding environment in addition to communications tasks. In other words, the sensing capability, traditionally used in radar systems, would be integrated into the communication system to build a symbiotic framework known as integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). Since radar sensing and wireless communication share similar characteristics, this integration would lead to spectrum efficiency and reduction in hardware cost compared to two separate systems. However, the co-design of sensing and communication poses several challenges and complexities in the physical and network layers, as well as security and privacy aspects of wireless systems. While there is a wealth of research addressing the above-mentioned challenges, a gap still remained between current research activities and the requirements of ISAC. Recently, 3GPP Rel-19 introduced 32 ISAC use cases along with their requirements. This paper reviews the 3GPP use cases to identify the required technologies and expected sensing outcomes, highlighting the gap between current research activities and ISAC requirements. The paper further explores concepts required to support the use cases, such as positioning, and different sensing sources (e.g., ambient radio frequency and radar signals). Following this, we explore the mutual benefits of integrated sensing with communication, security, radio access networks, digital twin, advanced antenna technologies, and multiple physical dimension transmission. Finally, the paper details the current progress of 3GPP technical specification groups and studies open challenges, available tools, and datasets in ISAC.

In fingerprint-based positioning methods, the received signal strength (RSS) vectors from access points are measured at reference points and saved in a database. Then, this dataset is used for the training phase of a pattern recognition algorithm. Several noise types impact the signals in radio channels, and RSS values are corrupted correspondingly. These noises can be mitigated by averaging the RSS samples. In real-time applications, the users cannot wait to collect uncorrelated RSS samples to calculate their average in the online phase of the positioning process. In this paper, we propose a solution for this problem by leveraging the distribution of RSS samples in the offline phase and the preceding state of the user in the online phase. In the first step, we propose a fast and accurate positioning algorithm using a deep neural network (DNN) to learn the distribution of available RSS samples instead of averaging them at the offline phase. Then, the similarity of an online RSS sample to the RPs’ fingerprints is obtained to estimate the user’s location. Next, the proposed DNN model is combined with a novel state-based positioning method to more accurately estimate the user’s location. Extensive experiments on both benchmark and our collected datasets in two different scenarios (single RSS sample and many RSS samples for each user in the online phase) verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm compared with traditional regression algorithms such as deep neural network regression, Gaussian process regression, random forest, and weighted KNN.

Fingerprint-based localization methods provide high accuracy location estimation, which use machine learning algorithms to recognize the statistical patterns of collected data. In these methods, the users’ locations can be estimated based on the received signal strength vectors from some transmitters. However, the data collection is a labor-intensive phase, and the collected data should be updated periodically. Many researchers have contributed to reducing this cost. The easiest way to remove the data collection cost is to use fingerprints generated by the model-based approaches, in which the trained machine learning algorithm can be updated based on the environment changes. Probabilistic-based localization algorithms, in addition to the user location, can estimate a region of interest called 2σ confidence interval in which the probability of user presence is 95%. Gaussian process regression (GPR) is a probabilistic method that can be used to achieve this goal. However, conventional GPR (CGPR) cannot accurately estimate the confidence interval when noise-free fingerprints generated by the model-based approaches are used in the training phase. In this paper, we propose a novel GPR-based localization algorithm, named enhanced GPR (EGPR), which improves the accuracy level of confidence interval estimation compared to the existing methods while fixing the level of computational complexity in the online phase. We also theoretically prove that GPR-based algorithms are minimum variance unbiased and efficient estimators. Experiments under line-of-sight and non-line-of-sight conditions demonstrate the superiority of our proposed method over counterparts in terms of accuracy as well as applicability in real-time localization systems.

Despite the recency of their conception, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) constitute an extensively-researched machine learning sub-field for the creation of synthetic data through deep generative modeling. GANs have consequently been applied in a number of domains, most notably computer vision, in which they are typically used to generate or transform synthetic images. Given their relative ease of use, it is therefore natural that researchers in the field of networking (which has seen extensive application of deep learning methods) should take an interest in GAN-based approaches. The need for a comprehensive survey of such activity is therefore urgent. In this paper, we demonstrate how this branch of machine learning can benefit multiple aspects of computer and communication networks, including mobile networks, network analysis, internet of things, physical layer, and cybersecurity. In doing so, we shall provide a novel evaluation framework for comparing the performance of different models in non-image applications, applying this to a number of reference network datasets.