AI-Aided and AI-Oriented Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computation: A Survey

Abstract

The evolution from 5G to 6G networks marks a transition toward the "intelligence of everything." While 5G enables enhanced connectivity, 6G aspires to embed intelligence directly into communication infrastructures, creating systems that are adaptive, context aware, and capable of autonomous decision making. Realizing such systems depends on harmonizing three fundamental functions that compete for shared network resources and often pursue conflicting goals: (i) sensing for environmental and contextual information acquisition, (ii) communication for reliable and timely information exchange, and (iii) computation for information processing and decision making. This harmonization necessitates shifting from independent optimization to their joint design as a unified system, a paradigm known as Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computation (ISCC). In parallel, AI has emerged both as an enabling tool for ISCC optimization and as a workload whose requirements influence ISCC system design. This survey comprehensively examines ISCC from this dual perspective by distinguishing between AI-aided ISCC, in which learning-based methods support the joint design and optimization of sensing, communication, and computation, and AI-oriented ISCC, in which these functions are jointly configured to support learning, inference, and distributed intelligence. The survey further examines the co-design of AI and ISCC, where AI requirements and ISCC constraints jointly shape system and model decisions. It further provides a comparative synthesis of the resulting design approaches, system architectures, performance metrics, and evaluation practices, relates these developments to application-specific requirements across different domains, and identifies open research problems toward scalable, adaptive, and trustworthy AI-ISCC systems.