The integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), in which the sensing and communication share the same frequency band and hardware, has emerged as a key technology in future wireless systems due to two main reasons. First, many important application scenarios in fifth generation (5G) and beyond, such as autonomous vehicles, Wi-Fi sensing and extended reality, requires both high-performance sensing and wireless communications. Second, with millimeter wave and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technologies widely employed in 5G and beyond, the future communication signals tend to have high-resolution in both time and angular domain, opening up the possibility for ISAC. As such, ISAC has attracted tremendous research interest and attentions in both academia and industry. Early works on ISAC have been focused on the design, analysis and optimization of practical ISAC technologies for various ISAC systems. While this line of works are necessary, it is equally important to study the fundamental limits of ISAC in order to understand the gap between the current state-of-the-art technologies and the performance limits, and provide useful insights and guidance for the development of better ISAC technologies that can approach the performance limits. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive survey for the current research progress on the fundamental limits of ISAC. Particularly, we first propose a systematic classification method for both traditional radio sensing (such as radar sensing and wireless localization) and ISAC so that they can be naturally incorporated into a unified framework. Then we summarize the major performance metrics and bounds used in sensing, communications and ISAC, respectively. After that, we present the current research progresses on fundamental limits of each class of the traditional sensing and ISAC systems. Finally, the open problems and future research directions are discussed.

In millimeter wave cellular communication, fast and reliable beam alignment via beam training is crucial to harvest sufficient beamforming gain for the subsequent data transmission. In this paper, we establish fundamental limits in beam-alignment performance under both the exhaustive search and the hierarchical search that adopts multi-resolution beamforming codebooks, accounting for time-domain training overhead. Specifically, we derive lower and upper bounds on the probability of misalignment for an arbitrary level in the hierarchical search, based on a single-path channel model. Using the method of large deviations, we characterize the decay rate functions of both bounds and show that the bounds coincide as the training sequence length goes large. We go on to characterize the asymptotic misalignment probability of both the hierarchical and exhaustive search, and show that the latter asymptotically outperforms the former, subject to the same training overhead and codebook resolution. We show via numerical results that this relative performance behavior holds in the non-asymptotic regime. Moreover, the exhaustive search is shown to achieve significantly higher worst-case spectrum efficiency than the hierarchical search, when the pre-beamforming signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is relatively low. This study hence implies that the exhaustive search is more effective for users situated further from base stations, as they tend to have low SNR.

Swift and accurate alignment of transmitter (Tx) and receiver (Rx) beams is a fundamental design challenge to enable reliable outdoor millimeter-wave communications. In this paper, we propose a new Optimized Two-Stage Search (OTSS) algorithm for Tx-Rx beam alignment via spatial scanning. In contrast to one-shot exhaustive search, OTSS judiciously divides the training energy budget into two stages. In the first stage, OTSS explores and trains all candidate beam pairs and then eliminates a set of less favorable pairs learned from the received signal profile. In the second stage, OTSS takes an extra measurement for each of the survived pairs and combines with the previous measurement to determine the best one. For OTSS, we derive an upper bound on its misalignment probability, under a single-path channel model with training codebooks having an ideal beam pattern. We also characterize the decay rate function of the upper bound with respect to the training budget and further derive the optimal design parameters of OTSS that maximize the decay rate. OTSS is proved to asymptotically outperform state-of-the-art beam alignment algorithms, and is numerically shown to achieve better performance with limited training budget and practically synthesized beams.

In connected vehicular networks, it is vital to have vehicular nodes that are capable of sensing surrounding environments and exchanging messages with each other for automating and coordinating purposes. Towards this end, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), combining both sensing and communication systems to jointly utilize their resources and pursue mutual benefits, emerges as a new cost-effective solution. In ISAC, the hardware and spectrum co-sharing leads to a fundamental tradeoff between sensing and communication performance, which is not well understood except for very simple cases with the same sensing and channel states, and perfect channel state information at the receiver (CSIR). In this paper, a general point-to-point ISAC model is proposed to account for the scenarios where the sensing state is different from but correlated with the channel state, and the CSIR is not necessarily perfect. For the model considered, the optimal tradeoff is characterized by a capacity-distortion function that quantifies the best communication rate for a given sensing distortion constraint requirement. An iterative algorithm is proposed to compute such tradeoff, and a few non-trivial examples are constructed to demonstrate the benefits of ISAC as compared to the separation-based approach.

In this work, we investigate the status packet covert communication with time uncertainty in time-critical wireless networks. We model the packet generation as a Poisson process that concatenates the information timeliness and communication covertness, since the prior transmission probability is highly correlated with the packet generation. To balance between the timeliness and covertness of the status packet transmission, we propose two schemes, named random sub-slot selection (RSS) scheme and random channel use selection (RCUS) scheme, by exploiting the random transmission time to confuse a warden Willie’s binary detection on the covert communication. Subsequently, the average age of information (AoI) subject to the covertness constraint is derived for the proposed RSS and RCUS schemes. It is demonstrated that the symbol-length of the status packet introduces a non-trivial tradeoff between the covertness and timeliness. Inspired by this, further designs of the symbol-length and the transmit power for the proposed two schemes are formulated as optimization problems and solved optimally. Our numerical results demonstrate the superiority of proposed schemes over the existing covert communication strategies. In addition, our examination reveals that the RCUS scheme outperforms the RSS scheme when the covertness constraint is extremely strict. Otherwise, the RSS scheme generally outperforms the RCUS scheme in terms of achieving a lower AoI.

In this paper, we investigate a self-sensing intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided millimeter wave (mmWave) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system. Unlike the conventional purely passive IRS, the self-sensing IRS can effectively reduce the path loss of sensing-related links, thus rendering it advantageous in ISAC systems. Aiming to jointly sense the target/scatterer/user positions as well as estimate the sensing and communication (SAC) channels in the considered system, we propose a two-phase transmission scheme, where the coarse and refined sensing/channel estimation (CE) results are respectively obtained in the first phase (using scanning-based IRS reflection coefficients) and second phase (using optimized IRS reflection coefficients). For each phase, an angle-based sensing turbo variational Bayesian inference (AS-TVBI) algorithm, which combines the VBI, messaging passing and expectation-maximization (EM) methods, is developed to solve the considered joint location sensing and CE problem. The proposed algorithm effectively exploits the partial overlapping structured (POS) sparsity and 2-dimensional (2D) block sparsity inherent in the SAC channels to enhance the overall performance. Based on the estimation results from the first phase, we formulate a Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) minimization problem for optimizing IRS reflection coefficients, and through proper reformulations, a low-complexity manifold-based optimization algorithm is proposed to solve this problem. Simulation results are provided to verify the superiority of the proposed transmission scheme and associated algorithms.