Wireless Networks That See: Integrated Sensing and Communication in Complex Environments

Abstract

The same radio interactions that complicate wireless communication can reveal what is happening around a network. Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) turns these interactions into opportunities to observe unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), road vehicles, and industrial mobile robots. Yet a strong echo is not necessarily a reliable object observation: stationary background can conceal motion, reflections can create virtual objects, and one viewpoint can leave part of an object's motion unobserved. This tutorial explains how known cellular signals are used to estimate propagation, suppress stationary background, interpret reflected paths, and combine observations from different sites. UAV examples under a Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) stochastic channel model and ray tracing in a San Francisco urban scene illustrate the mechanisms through spatial layouts, channel profiles, and before/after range--Doppler maps. Local checks reduce false outputs, with some loss of detection. Cooperation improves position accuracy for UAVs detected by both a single site and cooperating sites. The examples show how signal resources, measurement reporting, and application needs shape sensing performance, providing practical guidance for sensing services in complex environments.