Joint Communication, Sensing, and Computation Enabled 6G Intelligent Machine System

Abstract

With the rapid development of the smart city, high-level autonomous driving, intelligent manufacturing, and so on, the stringent industrial-level requirements of extremely low latency and high reliability for communication and new trends in sub-centimeter sensing have transcended the abilities of 5G and call for the development of 6G. Based on analyzing the function design of the communication, sensing, and emerging intelligent computation systems, we propose the joint communication, sensing, and computation (JCSC) framework for the 6G intelligent machine-type communication (IMTC) network to realize low latency and high reliability of communication, highly accurate sensing, and fast environment adaption. In the proposed JCSC framework, the communication, sensing, and computation abilities cooperate to benefit each other by utilizing the unified hardware, resource, and protocol design. Sensing information is exploited as a priori information to enhance the reliability and latency performance of wireless communication and to optimize the resource utilization of the communication network, which further improves the distributed computation and cooperative sensing ability. We propose promising enabling technologies such as joint communication and sensing (JCS), JCSC wireless networking techniques, and intelligent computation techniques. We also summarize the challenges to achieve the JCSC framework. Then we introduce intelligent flexible manufacturing as a typical use case of the IMTC with JCSC framework, where the enabling technologies are deployed. Finally, we present the simulation results to prove the feasibility of the JCSC framework by evaluating the JCSC waveform, and the JCSC-enabled neighbor discovery and medium access control.