ISLANDS: Integrated Sensing and communications for future vehicuLAr systems – a Network of Doctoral Students

For decades communication systems have been developed independently to radar systems, leading to a duplication of systems and devices that exploit the electromagnetic spectrum in common ways. Yet, the future wireless infrastructure will need to do more than just communications to support smart cities, intelligent mobility, infrastructure monitoring, security. It will need to perform multiple functions and will rely on high-reliability communication and sensing. The independent growth of radar and communication systems is no longer sustainable and will lead to a congestion of devises, emitters and sensors. There is a skills gap in the community to address this as communication engineers work isolated to radar engineers, and a new set of skills need to be developed.

ISLANDS is a doctoral network that focuses on the theoretical and algorithmic foundations of integrated sensing and communication for the automotive sector, with the objective of developing new physical-layer and network-level solutions, to explore the fundamental limits of such technology, and to provide experimental validation and testing for the developed techniques. Specifically, ISLANDS will: 1) develop new transceiver algorithms, capable of integrating and leveraging the communication and sensing functionalities, with the purpose of achieving superior performance and energy and hardware efficiency; 2) investigate the ultimate network performance limits that the integration of communication and sensing can achieve in environments with extreme mobility; and 3) provide experimental validations of the developed techniques with proof-of-concept testbeds and realistic system-level simulators.

ISLANDS will train the next generation of EU experts and leaders with specific interdisciplinary expertise, combining sensing and communications, with the aim of reinforcing European leadership in the automotive sector of the next decades.