MWL‘s Mike Robuck sits down with executives from Ericsson, AT&T, Verizon and the US Department of War (DoW) to discuss the progress Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has made this year and where it is headed next.
Ericsson Federal CEO Christopher Ling sees sensing as a potential killer app for 6G, arguing it could give the US military a reason to invest in commercial cellular infrastructure beyond connectivity.
Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) turns communications networks into sensors by analysing radio signals reflected from objects. It can detect, track and identify objects in much the same way as radar.
Ericsson Federal Technologies Group is the vendor’s US unit focused on adapting its commercial network technology for federal government and national-security customers.
ISAC has moved beyond laboratory testing over the past year. It has been demonstrated at a stadium, included in a US Department of War (DoW) contract and proposed for a Los Angeles, California trial ahead of the 2028 Olympics.
Dr Tom Rondeau, principal director of the DoW’s FutureG programme, said denser 5G and 6G networks, edge-based AI compute and greater access to commercial spectrum are making network-based sensing viable.
“We have a network that covers 70% of the landmass of the United States and about 98% of the population,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to use this for, to kick off the value proposition of ISAC.”
Rondeau highlighted drones, particularly swarms, as the immediate focus. The aim is to find, fix and track potentially thousands of devices, including in dense cities where traditional sensors struggle and radar cannot simply be pointed into open sky.
“It’s one thing to have a missile defence system or a drone defence system that gets to look up and out into open airspace,” he said, “but it’s another to track it in downtown New York [City] or downtown [Washington] DC.”
Network density could compensate for the limited sensing range of individual sites. At the power levels involved, a single base station might reach only a few kilometres, but sites spaced every half kilometre could extend coverage across much of the network.
Rondeau (pictured, left) pointed to Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb, in which drones smuggled deep into Russian territory and controlled over Russia’s cellular network reportedly destroyed roughly a third of its strategic bomber fleet.
“That tells us that we can no longer think of border security as just looking out of our geographical borders,” he said. “We have to be able to look across our entire nation.”
Rondeau also sees civilian applications for ISAC. Drawing on his time at DARPA studying emergency planning, he cited Hurricane Katrina, when evacuation plans fell apart because people did not go where planners expected.
“It’s not like we’re going to redirect them to where we want to be,” he said, “so why don’t we redirect the resources to where they actually are.”
Trials
AT&T and Ericsson ran a drone-detection demonstration near AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, during the FIFA World Cup football tournament a few months ago.
In nearby Dallas, Verizon and Samsung tested a crowd-density heatmap at the World Cup FanFest area, designed to help fans find shorter queues and organisers manage foot traffic.
“That was a crowd sensing for the FanFest area, which is completely different to detecting drones,” said Verizon CTO Yago Tenorio. “It looks like a business-to-business opportunity that you can monetise.”
Tenorio explained ISAC presents fewer privacy concerns than cameras because it returns shape, movement and rough size rather than identity. It can distinguish “a pedestrian from a bicycle and a drone from a bird”, though not one person from another.
The DoW has also begun funding development. In July, Cohere Technologies won a $28 million contract from the FutureG Office to build a multi-waveform radio access network prototype which uses commercial cellular infrastructure to detect drones and other aerial threats.
Ericsson and Finnish state-owned ICT company Erillisverkot have also run live demonstrations in a Helsinki cargo harbour, using sensing data from several network points to detect small, low-altitude drones.
Verizon’s 6G forum
Verizon has made ISAC one of two anchor themes of its 6G Innovation Forum, which it expanded in September. The other theme is AI wearables. Tenorio stated the forum was created to “design 6G bottoms up”, starting with viable use cases and how they might be monetised.
At Qualcomm’s San Diego, California campus, Verizon tested 100MHz to 400MHz of millimetre-wave spectrum across four synchronised transmission and reception points. The system mapped the position and velocity of an airborne target and moving ground vehicles while keeping a phone user on the ground connected over standalone 5G. Verizon presented the trial as a test of drone and vehicle safety tracking.
Millimetre wave was the only spectrum which offered enough bandwidth, Tenorio said, and bandwidth, more than frequency, determines sensing accuracy.
“The precision of the positioning and the radar image… is proportional to the bandwidth of the signal,” he stated. “Not so much the frequency, but the bandwidth.”
Technology divide
Huawei appears to have an early lead in ISAC deployments. Ling said Ericsson had been told the Chinese vendor has more than 300 ISAC-capable systems operating, although he cautioned the figure might not be exact. He linked the reported lead to China’s early nationwide shift to standalone 5G.
Ling (pictured, left) explained there’s a difference in terms of network architecture. In a monostatic configuration, one tower transmits a signal and receives its reflection, indicating an object’s presence and general direction. Huawei developed a monostatic system and, in Ling’s view, may now be reconsidering that approach. As far as he knows, Ericsson is the only company using a multistatic configuration, in which one site transmits and other sites receive the reflected signal, enabling more precise location and tracking.
A monostatic system might show an object is off to the left, he said. A multistatic system could place it 1,500 metres away, measure its speed and track it to within eight to 10 metres, the resolution he said the Arlington demonstration achieved.
Ling stressed that Ericsson is focused on 5G sensing rather than a fully integrated sensing and communication system. Turning a 5G network into a radar remains a significant technical challenge, he noted, and the company wants to establish the capability before moving further.
It has committed $100 million to ISAC and expects a commercial product within two years, ahead of the standards debate expected at the 2027 World Radiocommunication Conference.
Ling said micro-Doppler signatures from spinning propellers could allow the system to identify a drone type as well as locate it. “It’s not only detecting, tracking, you can get identification from it as well,” he said.
The resolution may eventually be good enough to support targeting without the more expensive radar systems the military uses today.
“You’ve got a drone that costs $30,000 and we’re shooting it down with a million-dollar missile,” he said. “This starts to bend the cost curve.”
Ericsson has held discussions with European countries bordering Russia, Ling added, and sees growing interest in the Middle East, where governments are concerned about protecting infrastructure.
From 5G to 6G
Tenorio described current ISAC work as a step towards 6G. Vendors are fitting sensing into 5G and 5G-Advanced systems while preserving as much connectivity capacity as possible; 6G would allow them to design the capability into the network from the outset.
“On 5G, you’re just squeezing it in as best as you possibly can,” he said. “But if you understand how it works, you have the opportunity to design it natively in 6G in a way that comes with no compromise.”
Verizon plans to extend its ISAC work to Los Angeles. The carrier has applied to the Federal Communications Commission for a one-year experimental licence to use 4.8GHz to 4.9GHz spectrum, part of the 4.4GHz band the NTIA is studying for 5G and 6G. It plans to test Ericsson hardware and software in and around its LA lab. The filing describes an outdoor private network within a five-kilometre radius, separate from commercial networks. The application is pending.
Tenorio called the band “a good compromise” between available bandwidth and a frequency low enough to propagate farther. Verizon has also applied to take part in the NTIA’s Mission 6G 28 programme, which will showcase 6G technology around the 2028 Olympics.
“LA will be an important opportunity for us to display not only what 6G is about… but where we are in terms of advancing the technology,” he said.
Beyond drones and crowds, Tenorio sees enterprise uses such as digital twins of factories and campuses. At shorter ranges, he said, ISAC could support vital-sign monitoring and fall detection in elderly care.
Shawn Hakl, SVP and head of product at AT&T Business, sees the value in places where cameras and sensors are impractical, or the assets belong to someone else. He cited public safety, analytics and flow control, and spotting changes such as an unplanned obstruction on a city street.
“ISAC gives us a way to get sort of topology information, environment information without having physically deployed stuff and basically getting signal data back,” he said.
Ling stated the military case may ultimately depend on sensing rather than connectivity: a customer which would not buy a 5G network solely for communications could still need the infrastructure to obtain 5G sensing.
The post Feature: Why ISAC is moving beyond labs to live trials appeared first on Mobile World Live.
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