Location: Ballroom 1
Moderator: Umberto Spagnolini, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Organizers: Umberto Spagnolini and Marouan Mizmizi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Panelists:
- Wenjia Liu, DOCOMO Beijing Lab
- Richard Stirling Gallacher, Huawei, Germany
- Reinaldo Valenzuela, Nokia Bell Labs, USA
- Kaitao Meng, Univ. Manchester, UK
Motivation and Background:
Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) is emerging as a key capability for 6G and beyond, promising native sensing functions tightly integrated with connectivity. While research on ISAC has grown significantly in recent years, industrial roadmaps, standardization trajectories, and deployment strategies are still in an early and fragmented phase. There is a concrete risk that ISAC remains a ``demo feature'' rather than a deployable capability unless standardization and ecosystem questions are addressed early and coherently. From an industrial viewpoint, several issues remain open: how to converge on common terminology and use cases across verticals (automotive, manufacturing, infrastructure, smart mobility); how to expose sensing capabilities through standardized interfaces and KPIs; how to handle coexistence and interference between sensing and communication within the same spectrum; and how to define a realistic path from 5G-Advanced to early ISAC features in 6G (e.g., within 3GPP, ETSI, and IEEE ecosystems). This panel brings together experts from [network vendors, chipset suppliers, operators, vertical industries, and standardization bodies] to discuss ISAC through a pragmatic lens: deployment timelines, cost/benefit trade-offs, and required features in upcoming standards. The objective is not to re-present research results, but to confront concrete industrial questions: (i) Which ISAC use cases will realistically drive investment? (ii) How should ISAC be captured in standards (architecture, PHY/MAC, KPIs)? (iii) How can industry avoid fragmentation into proprietary sensing solutions that cannot scale? By combining viewpoints from different segments of the value chain, the panel will help the WCNC community understand what needs to happen in the next 3--5 years for ISAC to become a standardized, interoperable capability rather than a collection of isolated proofs-of-concept.
Questions:
- Which ISAC use cases are most likely to be of impact in real deployments (e.g., automotive safety, infrastructure monitoring, indoor localization, Industry 4.0)?
- What are the key architectural and PHY/MAC features that must be standardized versus left to implementation?
- Cameras, lidars are existing sensors, but what are the expectations from radar-like sensing integrated in sensing?
- How can sensing and communication functions share spectrum without jeopardizing either service?
- What are the main barriers that currently prevent ISAC from becoming a commercial feature and what steps should industry and standardization bodies take in the next 3--5 years to overcome them?
Panelists Biographies:
|
Umberto Spagnolini is Professor of Statistical Signal Processing at Politecnico di Milano, Director of Joint Lab Huawei-Politecnico di Milano and appointed Huawei Industry Chair. PI of “Next Generation Wireless and Technology” within RESTART program supported by Next Generation Eu. He is General Chair of International Symposium on Joint Communications & Sensing. He published more than 400 peer-reviewed scientific papers divided into 150+ journal papers, and 200+ conference papers, 6 book-chapters, 4 international books including the latest methodological book on statistical signal processing methods and applications: U.Spagnolini, “Statistical Signal Processing in Engineering”, John Wiley & Sons, 2018. He is inventor in 36 patents, some of them are released to industry as essential-patents in consumer or industrial products. He received best paper award from SPAWC07, IEEE- WRECOM07, ICASSP2006, IET-Intelligent Transportation System, Joint Communication and Sensing 2021, and others in 1988-2000. |
|
Wenjia Liu received the B.S. degree in electronics engineering and the Ph.D. degree in signal and information processing from Beihang University, Beijing, China, in 2011 and 2017, respectively. She was a Visiting Student with the Communications Laboratory, Technische Universitat Dresden, Dresden, Germany, in 2015. She is now a senior researcher in wireless technology department of DOCOMO Beijing Laboratories. Her current research interests include integrated sensing and communication, non-terrestrial network, and other emerging technologies for 5G-Advanced and 6G. |
|
Dr. Richard A. Stirling-Gallacher joined Huawei Technologies Inc., San Diego, CA, USA, in 2014, and subsequently in 2017, transferred to Munich Research Center, Huawei Technologies Duesseldorf GmbH, Munich, Germany, as a Research Expert/Team Leader. He currently holds more than 140 granted U.S. patents and serves as the Vice Chair for the ETSI ISG on ISAC. His current research interests include ISAC and positioning and massive MIMO for 6G communication systems. |
|
Dr. Reinaldo A. Valenzuela: Fellow IEEE. IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award. Bell Labs Fellow. B.Sc. U. of Chile, Ph.D. Imperial College. Director, Wireless Communications Research Department, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Bell Laboratories. Engaged in propagation measurements and models, MIMO/space time systems achieving high capacities using transmit and receive antenna arrays, HetNets, small cells and next generation air interface techniques and architectures. He has published 190 papers and 44 patents. He has over 21,300 Google Scholar citations and is a 'Highly Cited Author' In Thomson ISI and a Fulbright Senior Specialist |
|
Dr. Kaitao Meng is Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Manchester, UK. He received the Ph.D. from Wuhan University, Wuhan, in 2021. He serves as an Editor for several IEE journals, and he organized a special issue on Smart Environment Engineering for Integrated Sensing and Communication in IEEE TCCN. His current research interests mainly include network-level integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), cooperative sensing and communication, intelligent surfaces, and multi-UAV collaboration. |