Mobile networks have traditionally had one job: moving information from one place to another.
But Samsung believes the same infrastructure could eventually be used to understand what is happening in the physical world around it – without necessarily relying on cameras or dedicated sensors.
The technology behind the idea is Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), which is being explored as part of the industry’s work towards 6G.
Samsung recently put the technology to the test with Verizon at a live international sporting event in Dallas, where the companies used mobile network infrastructure to detect crowd density and movement.
The trial took place last month, but the bigger question is what the technology could eventually mean for operators and businesses. Instead of deploying networks solely to connect devices, the same infrastructure could potentially become a large-scale sensing platform.
“In a nutshell, ISAC reframes the whole mobile communication system as a distributed sensing platform,” Samsung Electronics America Director of Technology, Sanil Ramachandran, tells Mobile Europe.
Using already available signals
ISAC is built around information that mobile networks already produce. Radio signals travelling between devices and base stations interact with the physical environment. Buildings, vehicles, people and other objects can alter the characteristics of those signals.
“Traditionally, in these systems, you transmit radio signals. It bounces off whatever environment they are in, whether it’s a building, a nearby car, or even a drone flying by.” Ramachandran explains.
“In ISAC, the integrated sensing and communication system, it reframes the whole idea of this communication, and it tries to leverage those impairments to understand and be aware of the surroundings.”
For businesses, that potentially means getting another function from infrastructure that is already deployed for connectivity.
Rather than installing separate systems for every sensing requirement, enterprises could eventually use the mobile network itself for some applications, he explains.
From connectivity to crowd intelligence
The technology giant recently partnered with Verizon, showcasing the potential of using ISAC to monitor crowd density at a live event.
The companies used commercial 5G devices, CBRS spectrum, Samsung’s virtualised RAN technology and an AI-based ISAC application to estimate crowd density and movement in near real time.
“We were able to detect the density of the crowd in real time using this technology and see them moving, also in real time,” he says.
For venue operators, crowd monitoring would typically involve cameras and associated analytics infrastructure; however, ISAC presents another option.
“You’re using the existing mobile communication infrastructure to generate similar heat maps without actually using any cameras,” he says.
“It does not identify individuals. It is a density of the people, whether there is a higher crowd, which is medium crowd versus low crowd – a gradient and a heat map, not an identification of people itself or individuals themselves.”
Looking beyond the stadium
Samsung sees the potential market extending across several industries.
“The use cases are plenty,” Ramachandran explains. “It could be civilian, enterprise and even military use cases.”
He uses drone detection and identification of drones and UAVs as an example, alongside intrusion detection.
In industrial environments, ISAC could potentially help identify when a person or object enters an area where it should not be.
Vehicle-to-everything technology, he explains, is another possible application, with sensing capabilities providing additional information about the environment surrounding connected vehicles.
AI remains a barrier to scale
Turning radio signals into useful business information, however, is demanding.
“There is a lot of data, he explains. “The data that is coming from the infrastructure, the mobile infrastructure, or the communication systems, it’s huge.”
For the Dallas demonstration, Samsung Research America used an AI-based ISAC inferencing application to process information from the network and turn changes in radio frequencies into estimates of crowd density.
But the technology is still developing. AI models need to be trained and retrained to improve their accuracy, and processing the volume of information coming from a mobile network requires significant computing power.
“It takes a lot of compute to learn and relearn and then retrain the algorithms to make sure that we have the accuracy of the detection,” he explains.
Testing 6G ideas on today’s capabilities
ISAC is being explored as part of the industry’s development of 6G, but Samsung is not waiting for 6G networks to arrive before testing what it can do.
Instead, it is using 5G infrastructure to explore the technology and gather lessons that could feed into future standards.
“What we’re trying to do is we are trying to validate the technology concepts over 5G so that we take these learnings and make sure that when you standardise the 6G with ISAC, these learnings can be useful,” he concludes.
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