At a Shanghai forum hosted by Southeast University this month, Professor Wang Jiangzhou — a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering — argued that the next generation of mobile networks must fuse communication and sensing to meet the demands of industrial and safety‑critical applications. Wang framed the case for 6G not as a mere speed bump beyond 5G but as a structural upgrade whose defining feature will be the co‑design of sensing and communications on a shared hardware and spectrum platform.
Wang said 5G has been transformative for consumer broadband but falls short for ‘‘verticals’’ such as industrial robotics, remote surgery and autonomous driving, where millisecond latency and ultra‑high reliability are non‑negotiable. He described ‘‘integrated sensing and communication’’ — known in China as tong‑gan yiti hua — as the technical pivot that will allow a single system to transmit data while simultaneously performing radar‑like detection, using shared RF front ends, unified waveforms and joint data processing.
The case for integration is both technical and practical. Wang outlined how cooperative, multi‑station sensing can overcome the line‑of‑sight and coverage limits of single sensors: multi‑angle measurements reduce occlusion, spatial diversity boosts coverage and precision, and coordinated deployments can sustain continuous monitoring across city streets, factory floors and low‑altitude airspace.
China, he noted, is already moving policy and funding to match the rhetoric. Authorities have folded 6G into national science planning for the new five‑year period, set up focused R&D funds and mobilised the IMT‑2030 (6G) promotion group. He contrasted China’s effort with parallel initiatives in Europe and the United States — the EU’s 6G flagship under Horizon Europe and the US NextG consortia — to argue that an industry consensus on 6G’s importance has taken hold globally.
Practical applications Wang detailed range from industrial IoT and smart manufacturing to traffic monitoring, low‑altitude aircraft management, drone tracking, smart homes and non‑contact health monitoring. For safety‑critical uses such as remote surgery and automated driving, the combined sensing and communications approach promises both the deterministic latency and contextual awareness that pure communications stacks struggle to provide.
The technical hurdles are significant. Wang cited open problems including the scattering‑property modelling needed for reliable sensing in complex electromagnetic environments, metrics for ‘‘sensing capacity’’ that mirror communications theory, and the coupling relationships between cooperative sensing and communication performance. There are also harder systems questions: how to standardise shared spectrum use, how to design unifying waveforms that serve both functions, and where to place the compute that will fuse large streams of sensing and comms data.
Beyond engineering, the integration model raises governance and strategic questions. Systems that embed wide‑area sensing into civilian networks could generate powerful surveillance capabilities and cross jurisdictional privacy concerns. At the same time, the dual‑use nature of advanced sensing and resilient communications makes the technology attractive to defence planners, complicating export controls, standards diplomacy and the multilateral rule‑making that will shape 6G’s rollout.
Wang’s takeaway was unequivocal: if 6G is to meet the demands of industry and national strategy, integrated communication‑and‑sensing — and especially cooperative, multi‑station implementations — will be central. Accelerating breakthroughs in the underlying science and resolving regulatory and standardisation questions will determine which countries and companies win the ‘‘high ground’’ of the next wireless transition.