Exploring ISAC: Information-Theoretic Insights

This article reviews results from the literature illustrating the bottlenecks and tradeoffs of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) through the lens of information theory, thus offering a distinct perspective compared to recent works that focus on signal processing, wireless communications, or other related overviews. Different models and scenarios are considered and compared. For example, scenarios where radar sensing is performed at the communication and radar transmitter (mono-static ISAC) and scenarios where the radar receiver differs from the radar transmitter (called bi-static radar). Similarly, we discuss ISAC bottlenecks and tradeoffs both in slowly-varying environments where the main sensing target is described by a single parameter and accordingly, sensing performance is described by detection error probabilities, as well as in fast-varying environments, where the sensing targets are described by vectors and thus vector-valued performance measures such as average distortions like mean-squared errors are used to determine sensing performances. This overview article further also considers limitations and opportunities in network ISAC environments, such as collaborative or interactive sensing, and the influence of secrecy and privacy requirements on ISAC systems, a line of research that has received growing interest over the last few years. For all these scenarios, we provide and discuss precise models and their limitations and provide either bounds or full characterizations of the fundamental information-theoretic performance limits of these systems. Further extensions as well as important open research directions are also discussed.