T8 – Integrated Sensing and Communications in 6G Era: A Tutorial

Presenter: Husheng Li, Purdue University, USA

Abstract: Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) is emerging as a key enabling technology for 6G wire- less systems, offering substantial gains in spectral and power efficiency by unifying radar sensing and data communications within a single waveform and hardware platform. This tutorial provides a comprehensive and coherent introduction to ISAC, aiming to bridge the long-standing gap between the radar and communications communities. Starting from fundamental principles, the tutorial reviews the essential building blocks of modern communication systems and radar sensing, highlighting both their intrinsic compatibilities and critical differences. Building on this foundation, it presents unified perspectives on ISAC, including spatial multiplexing, sphere packing, broadcast channel modeling, and electromagnetic degrees of freedom, which together reveal the fundamental trade-offs between sensing and communication performance. The tutorial further surveys state-of-the-art waveform design methodologies from both communication-centric and sensing-centric viewpoints, as well as recent advances in exploiting reciprocity between sensing and communication tasks. Extending beyond monostatic systems, the tutorial addresses key challenges in ISAC networking, including noncoherence, asynchrony, interference, and scheduling in bistatic and multistatic settings. Finally, practical applications and hardware demonstrations are discussed, with an emphasis on UAV and cyber-physical systems. This tutorial is intended for researchers and engineers seeking a unified, system-level understanding of ISAC and its role in future 6G networks.

Presenter’s Bio:

Husheng Li:

Husheng Li received his BS and PhD degrees, both in electrical engineering, from Tsinghua University (1998) and Princeton University (2005), respectively. He joined Qualcomm Inc. as a senior engineer after his graduation from Princeton. In 2007, he joined the EECS department of the University of Ten- nessee, Knoxville, where he was promoted to associated professor and full professor in 2013 and 2019, respectively. In 2022, he joined Purdue University, affiliated in both the School of Aeronautics and Astro- nautics and the Elmore School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. His research interest includes wireless communications, statistical signal processing, cyber physical systems, networked control, and information theory. He has received numerous best paper awards in journals such as the EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking (2015) and conferences such as IEEE ICC (2012) and Globecom (2017). Li has been intensively working on ISAC since 2018. He is among the pioneers working in this area, with more than 20 publications related to ISAC (to name a few [5–9]).