Enabling ISAC in Industry 4.0: Challenges and Opportunities

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) drive Industry 4.0 by integrating physical processes with digital control and communication. While conventional deployments heavily rely on Internet of Things (IoT) sensors for monitoring and automation, these setups can incur excessive hardware overhead and fragmented data flows. In contrast, Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) offers a promising alternative by reusing communication signals to perform sensing without dedicated sensor hardware. ISAC can be used in CPS to reduce overhead, improve real-time situational awareness, and enable advanced industrial applications. This paper explores how ISAC can be incorporated into a 6 G architecture for smart factories, highlighting new network functions to coordinate sensing activities and manage Sensing Data. Through a detailed use case and reference architecture, we identify key challenges, including resource allocation, data fusion, distributed computing, and coordination among 6 G entities. We then propose techniques for resource- and energy-efficient data collection and predictive sensing, demonstrating their viability via an example tracking scenario. This work provides insights into the design choices and opens research areas for future 6 G systems aiming to unify sensing and communication within CPS.