Multimodal Sensing and Communications for B5G/6G Systems

Dear Colleagues,

Beyond fifth-generation (B5G) and sixth-generation (6G) communication systems are expected to support a wide range of intelligent applications such as autonomous driving, immersive extended reality (XR), smart manufacturing, and large-scale Internet of Things (IoT). To meet the stringent ultra-low latency, high reliability, massive connectivity, and energy efficiency requirements, future wireless systems must tightly integrate sensing, communication, and intelligent processing capabilities.

Multimodal sensing, which jointly exploits heterogeneous data from vision, radar, lidar, audio, and other sensing modalities, plays a critical role in enabling environment awareness, context understanding, and task-oriented intelligence in B5G/6G networks. Meanwhile, the explosive growth of sensing data poses significant challenges to wireless communications under bandwidth-, energy-, and latency-constrained conditions. This motivates the development of new communication paradigms that are sensing-aware, task-oriented, and intelligence-driven.

This Special Issue will focus on the theories, algorithms, system architectures, and practical implementations of multimodal sensing and communications for B5G/6G systems. We aim to present recent advances from academia and industry that bridge multimodal perception, intelligent signal processing, and next-generation wireless communications, as well as their applications in emerging intelligent systems.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Multimodal sensing and perception techniques for B5G/6G networks;
• Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) and joint sensing–communication–computation systems;
• Task-oriented and semantic communications for multimodal data;
• AI-driven sensing, transmission, and resource allocation strategies;
• Multimodal data compression, feature encoding, and bandwidth-efficient transmission;
• Cooperative sensing and communications for multi-agent and multi-robot systems;
• Edge–cloud collaborative processing for multimodal sensing applications;
• Multimodal communications for autonomous driving, UAVs, and smart robotics;
• Experimental platforms, prototypes, and real-world demonstrations for B5G/6G systems.

We welcome original research articles, surveys, and application-oriented contributions that advance the state of the art of multimodal sensing and communications for B5G/6G systems.

Dr. Tantan Zhao
Dr. Qinghe Du
Guest Editors

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