Cooperative ISAC Networks: Opportunities and Challenges (IEEE Wireless Communications Vol 32, Issue 3)

The integration of sensing and communication (ISAC) emerges as a cornerstone technology for the sixth generation era, seamlessly incorporating sensing functionality into wireless networks as a native capability. The main challenges in efficient ISAC are constituted by its limited sensing and communication (S&C) coverage as well as severe inter-cell interference. Network-level ISAC relying on multi-cell cooperation is capable of effectively expanding both the S&C coverage, and of providing extra degrees of freedom (DoF) for realizing increased integration gains between S&C. In this work, we provide new considerations for ISAC networks, including new metrics, the optimization of the DoF, and cooperation regimes, and we highlight new S&C trade-offs. Then, we discuss a suite of cooperative S&C architectures, both at the task, as well as, data and signal levels. Furthermore, the interplay between S&C at the network level is investigated, and promising research directions are outlined.