Wireless sensing – enabler of future wireless technologies

Abstract

With the completion of the 5G standardization efforts, the wireless communication world has now turned to the road ahead, the future wireless communication visions. One common vision is that future networks will be flexible, or able to accommodate an even richer variety of services with stringent, often conflicting requirements. This ambitious feat can only be accomplished with a ubiquitous awareness of the radio and physical environment. To this end, this paper highlights the importance of wireless sensing as a means for radio environment awareness and surveys wireless sensing methods under different domains. Then, a review of wireless sensing from a standardization perspective is given. These standardization efforts will provide the initial landscape upon which research into future wireless sensing methods will be built upon. Therefore, the paper is concluded by outlining imperative standardization requirements and future directions in wireless sensing.