Sensing and Wireless Communications

Dear Colleagues,

The current trends in sensing and wireless communications fields are generally difficult to predict in terms of what technologies will reshape the market associated with these two fields. Sensing technologies are dependent on sensor technology enablers (TEs) that provide sensing applications for both commercial and defense applications. Some emerging applications include (i) Earth monitoring for weather and crop prediction, earthquake detection and tracking, flood prediction and response, and wildfire prevention and response; (ii) Global Position Satellite System (GNSS) environment sensing for the prediction of soil moisture content, ice and snow thickness, ocean heights, and wind speed and direction, etc; (iii) sensing for autonomous driving, emergency braking, adaptive cruise control, and self-parking; (iv) sensing for internet of things (IoT) applications using a wide range of IoT sensors, including biomedical, proximity, humidity, chemical, image, and accelerometer sensors; (v) missile detection and tracking for human protection against missile threats; and (vi) intelligence surveillance reconnaissance (ISR). Likewise, wireless communications technologies are dependent on communication TEs, covering a wide range of commercial and defense communications applications. Recent applications include (i) space-based wireless communications providing both line-of-sight (LOS) and beyond line-of-sight (BLOS) video, audio, text, data communications capabilities; (ii) advanced terrestrial-based wireless communications using 4G, 5G, and 6G (to be deployed by 2030) technologies that provide mobile web access, IP telephony, high-definition mobile TV, video conferencing, 3D television, gaming services, cable internet, internet-of-things (IoT) with machine-to-machine (M2M), human-to-machine (H2M), and machine-to-human (M2H) services, and low-latency advanced communication service for artificial intelligence-of-things (ACS-AIoT) with edge computing capabilities; (iii) wideband global satellite communication (SATCOM) providing both commercial and defense wideband data comnnunication capabilities; (iv) protected satellite communications (SATCOM) providing anti-jammed communication capabilities for both tactical (edge) and strategic users; (v) 5G/6G satellite integration (SATis5/6) providing advanced communication capabilities for communications-on-the-move (COTM) for moving user terminals over a large area such as ships at sea or cars driving across the US, and potential backup of the terrestrial network to improve 5G/6G network resiliency; and (vi) mobile adhoc networking (MANET) technology providing adhoc communication capabilities for airbornes, vehicles, and vessels.           

With the advancement of data sciences along with machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML-AI), the current trend is to incorporate ML-AI into the design and operations of sensing and communications systems, making them much smarter with new autonomous capabilities; these include self-reconfiguration and adjustment to adapt to the operational environment, and self-scaling to accommodate new end users. In addition, ML-AI technology enablers can also facilitate the seamless integration between sensing and communication systems, leading to new capabilities for M2M, H2M, and M2H interfaces associated with IoT, ACS-AIoT, and cyber-physical networking (CPN) services.

The aim of this Special Issue is to seek original and unpublished research contributions, tutorials, and review papers that address a wide range of topics regarding Sensing and Wireless Communications (SAC), including new and advanced sensor TEs, sensing techniques, sensing applications, new and innovative wireless communication TEs, advanced communication techniques, emerging wireless communication applications, integrated SAC (ISAC) technology enablers, and ICS techniques and applications. Some of the indicative SAC and ISAC topics for this Special Issue are given below:

• Sensor TEs: Advancements in sensor TEs related to (i) electro optical (EO) technology associated with photoconductive, photovoltaics, phototransistors, photodiodes sensors; (ii) infrared (IR) connected with pyroelectric, Golay cells, bolometers, and thermopiles IR sensors, etc.; (iii) lasers such as light detection and ranging (LIDAR); (iv) radar such as pulse radar, Doppler radar, continuous wave (CW) radar, frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar, deep dive CW (DD-CW) radar, short-wave radar (SRR), mid-wave radar (MWR), and long-wave radar (LWR); (v) acceleration sensors such as piezoelectric, strain gauges, MEMS, and capacitive sensors; and (vi) position, navigation, and timing (PNT) sensors such as GPS, Glonass, BeiDou, Galileo, and the Quasi-Zennith Satellite System (QZSS). Other topics of interest related to this subject area are advanced sensors and smart sensor design and photonic quantum sensors for health monitoring, intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), smart cities, autonomous driving, and IoT.  
• Sensing Techniques: Some examples of sensing techniques include (i) remote sensing using synthetic aperture radar (SAR), interferometric SAR, Doppler radar, LIDAR, radiometers, photometers, etc; (ii) ISR techniques using spectropolarimetric imaging, SAR, spotlight SAR, sliding spotlight SAR, scan SAR and stripmap SAR; (iii) high-resolution wide swath (HRWS SAR), HRWS sliding spotlight-SAR, HRWS scan-SAR, HRWS stripmap-SAR; and (iv) digital cartography or digital mapping techniques using LIDAR, SAR, and HRWS SAR, interferometric SAR, etc. Other related topics of interest in this subject area are (i) advanced sensing techniques using bi-static SAR/HRWS-SAR and multi-static SAR/HRWS-SAR, (ii) active phase array antenna (APAA) design and small, low-weight, low-power, and low-cost (SWAP-Cost) passive slot array antenna (PSAA) design for conventional SAR and HRWS-SAR applications, and (iii) profilerated low Earth orbiter (pLEO) small satellite constellations using low SWAP-cost HRWS-SAR payload with distributed coherent beamforming (DisCoBeam) capabilities for future global ISR.   
• Sensing Applications: Global ISR; 2-D/3-D digital mapping; object detection, acquisition, and tracking; weather monitoring prediction; earthquake detection and tracking; flood prediction and response; wildfire prevention and response; crop prediction; high-precision platform position, navigation, and timing; high-resolution imaging; electromagnetic radiation detection; autonomous driving; robotics; smart cities; and defense applications such as force protection. Topics related to the application of energy-efficient embedded intelligent sensor systems, ML-AI for automotive perception and autonomous driving, and quantum sensors are also of interest.
• Wireless Communication TEs: Advanced digital communication waveforms and modulation TEs at the physical-layer level (some existing TEs include BPSK, QPSK/OQPSK, MPSK, DPSK, MSK, GMSK, FSK, MFSK, QAM/OQAM, ASK, MASK, etc); innovative channel coding (CC) TEs at the data link layer (some existing CC TEs are linear and BCH, Reed–Solomon (RS), convolutional, concatenated RS-convolutional, turbo, turbo product, low-density parity check (LDPC), polar and rate-compatible polar (RC-Polar) codes, etc.); advanced channel coding and coded modulation techniques using trellis-coded modulation (TCM), multilevel TCM and unequal error protection (UEP), bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM), turbo TCM, and hybrid multidimensional coded modulation schemes. Other related topics of interest in this subject area are as follows: (i) Advanced adaptive coded modulation, adaptive nonbinary LDPC-coded multidimensional modulation suitable for high-speed optical communications, (ii) adaptive hybrid free-space optical (FSO)-RF-coded modulation, (iii) new radio (NR) waveforms for existing 4G/5G wireless communication systems, (iv) advanced modulation and coding for 4G/5G/6G wireless communication systems, (vi) software-defined radio (SDR), (vii) software-defined networking (SDN), (viii) network function virtualization (NFV), and (ix) cloud communication technology concepts.   
• Communications Techniques: Advancements in (i) single-carrier modulation (SCM) techniques using amplitude, phase, frequency, TCM, Turbo-TCM and advanced adaptive coded modulation (ACM), etc; (ii) multiple carrier modulation (MCM) techniques using coherent adaptive subcarrier modulation (CASM), PCM/PSK/PM-Sinewave Subcarriers, the OFDM-multicarrier code (OFDM-MC), and intrinsic mode functions with a unique and sparse frequency band generated via variational mode decomposition (IMFs-VMD), etc.; (iii) innovative multiple access techniques using time division multiplexing access (TDMA), frequency division multiplexing access (FDMA), code division multiplexing access (CDMA), orthogonal frequency division multiplexing access (OFDMA) and hybrid division multiplexing access (H-DMA); and (iv) protected communications using anti-jam, low probability of interception, and low probability of detection (AJ/LPI/LPD) techniques. Related topics of interest for this subject area include smart antenna, adaptive antenna array, distributed coherent beamforming technology for the extended wireless communication range of a low-power communications system-of-systems, pulse communications, ultra-wideband communications, advanced propagation modeling and the sounding of communications channels, and advanced ML-AI for wireless communications.        
• Wireless Communications Applications: Voice calls (VOIP), audio transmission, live video streaming, image data dissemination, text messages, internet access, internet of things (IoT) devices, etc; SATCOM, Mobile SATCOM, and SATCOM on-the-move using satellites that send and receive required information and mission data such as weather forecasting, TV broadcasting, EO/IR and SAR imaging data for situational awareness, platform tracking, telemetry, and command (TT&C) data, etc.; IoT and wireless sensor networks (WSN) for smart homes, autonomous driving, traffic management, environmental monitoring, etc; wireless local area networks (WLAN) for connecting devices to the internet without wires; and wireless power transfer (WPT) for sending electrical power to the desired devices and systems without cords. Other topics of interest related to advanced wireless communications applications using ML-AI technology include ML-AI-Driven Distributed Communication Systems; Advanced Communication Systems for AI of Things (ACS-AIoT); AI-Based Collaborative Computing for Smart Communications and Networking Systems; communication framework design for AIoT; passive and active target recognition communication technologies for AIoT; communication task scheduling for AIoT; cloud, edge, and-fog communication architecture for AIoT; AIoT-based innovative communication systems and services for smart homes, smart cities, smart forests, and smart industries; communication architecture for federated learning-based AIoT environments; smart communication and networking using a shared long short-term memory (S-LSTM) generative adversarial network (GAN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN) (i.e., RNN with adversarial training); and commercial and defense 5G/6G Satellite Integration (SATis5/6).
• Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) TEs: TEs for commercial-off-the shelf radar-common data link (COTS-R-CDL), full duplex radar and radio communication TEs using multi-function RF (MFRF) technology, multibeam TEs using steerable analog antenna arrays, MFRF APAA for ISAC applications, and MIMO radars. Related topics of interest in this subject area are: (i) 5G/6G TEs allowing for ISAC applications, and (ii) new and advanced ISAC TEs for radar-and-communication waveform selection and sensor and communication resource management (SCRM). Other topics related to waveform selection include optimization of the (i) MFRF radar system performance, which will be the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the radar receiver, RX, range/velocity resolution, mainlobe width, and integrated or peak side-lobe level of the autocorrelation function, detection probability, and estimation performance, and (ii) the MFRF communication system channel capacity and/or spectral efficiency at the communication user terminal.
• ISAC Techniques and Applications: Innovative COTS-R-CDL and multiple beamforming techniques for antenna aperture sharing that efficiently perform both communications and sensing functions, and advanced ISAC with incorporated ML-AI techniques for optimizing radar and communications resources for (i) space-based remote sensing and near real-time mission data dissemination that can be used for environmental monitoring and ISR missions, (ii) space-based systems networking, (iii) vehicular and terrestrial networking, (iv) IoT and combined AIoT and IoT, and (v) smart city and indoor services such as human activity and gesture recognition.  

Dr. Tien M. Nguyen
Guest Editor

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