Time, Simultaneity, and Causality in Wireless Networks with Sensing and Communications
Abstract: Wireless systems beyond 5G evolve towards embracing both sensing and communication, resulting in increased convergence of the digital and the physical world. The existence of fused digital-physical realms raises critical questions regarding temporal ordering, causality, and the synchronization of events. This paper addresses the temporal challenges arising from the fact that the wireless infrastructure becomes an entity with multisensory perception. With the growing reliance on real-time interactions and applications such as digital twins, extended reality, and the metaverse, the need for accurate timestamping and temporal forensics becomes crucial. The paper introduces a model that incorporates Temporal Windows of Integration (TWI) to emulate human multisensory perception and discusses the implications for setting timing constraints in real-time applications and enabling temporal forensics. The analysis explores trade-offs, probabilities, and bounds for simultaneity and causality violation in the context of wireless systems evolving towards perceptive networks. This work underscores the significance of timestamping in the evolving wireless landscape, provide insights into system-level implications, and points out new research avenues for systems that combine sensing and communications.
- I. Parvez, A. Rahmati, I. Guvenc, A. I. Sarwat, and H. Dai, “A survey on low latency towards 5G: RAN, core network and caching solutions,” IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 20, no. 4, pp. 3098–3130, 2018.
- R. D. Yates, Y. Sun, D. R. Brown, S. K. Kaul, E. Modiano, and S. Ulukus, “Age of information: An introduction and survey,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. 39, no. 5, pp. 1183–1210, 2021.
- P. Popovski, F. Chiariotti, K. Huang, A. E. Kalør, M. Kountouris, N. Pappas, and B. Soret, “A perspective on time toward wireless 6G,” Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 110, no. 8, pp. 1116–1146, 2022.
- A. Alkhateeb, S. Jiang, and G. Charan, “Real-time digital twins: Vision and research directions for 6G and beyond,” IEEE Communications Magazine, 2023.
- I. F. Akyildiz and H. Guo, “Wireless communication research challenges for extended reality (XR),” ITU Journal on Future and Evolving Technologies, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 1–15, 2022.
- F. Liu, Y. Cui, C. Masouros, J. Xu, T. X. Han, Y. C. Eldar, and S. Buzzi, “Integrated sensing and communications: Toward dual-functional wireless networks for 6G and beyond,” IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC), vol. 40, no. 6, pp. 1728–1767, 2022.
- L. Xie, S. Song, Y. C. Eldar, and K. B. Letaief, “Collaborative sensing in perceptive mobile networks: Opportunities and challenges,” IEEE Wireless Communications, vol. 30, no. 1, pp. 16–23, 2023.
- 3GPP, “Feasibility study on integrated sensing and communication,” 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP), Technical Specification (TS) 22.837, 09 2023, version 19.1.0.
- J. Vroomen and M. Keetels, “Perception of intersensory synchrony: A tutorial review,” Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, vol. 72, no. 4, pp. 871–884, 2010.
- A. Einstein, “On the electrodynamics of moving bodies,” Annalen der physik, vol. 17, no. 10, pp. 891–921, 1905.
- L. Lamport, “Time, clocks, and the ordering of events in a distributed system,” Commun. ACM, vol. 21, no. 7, pp. 558–565, jul 1978. [Online]. Available: https://doi.org/10.1145/359545.359563
- L. Xie, P. Wang, S. Song, and K. B. Letaief, “Perceptive mobile network with distributed target monitoring terminals: Leaking communication energy for sensing,” IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, vol. 21, no. 12, pp. 10 193–10 207, 2022.
- C. Spence and S. Squire, “Multisensory integration: maintaining the perception of synchrony,” Current Biology, vol. 13, no. 13, pp. R519–R521, 2003.
- A. Shrivastava, P. Derler, Y.-S. L. Baboud, K. Stanton, M. Khayatian, H. A. Andrade, M. Weiss, J. Eidson, and S. Chandhoke, “Time in cyber-physical systems,” in Proceedings of the Eleventh IEEE/ACM/IFIP International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis, 2016, pp. 1–10.
- E. A. Lee, R. Akella, S. Bateni, S. Lin, M. Lohstroh, and C. Menard, “Consistency vs. availability in distributed real-time systems,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.08906, 2023.
- S. Kaul, R. Yates, and M. Gruteser, “Real-time status: How often should one update?” in IEEE Conf. Comput. Commun. (INFOCOM), Mar. 2012, pp. 2731–2735.
- A. Kosta, N. Pappas, and V. Angelakis, “Age of information: A new concept, metric, and tool,” Found. Trends Netw., vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 162–259, Nov. 2017.
- C. Baquero and N. Preguiça, “Why logical clocks are easy,” Communications of the ACM, vol. 59, no. 4, pp. 43–47, 2016.
- M. Lohstroh, E. A. Lee, S. A. Edwards, and D. Broman, “Logical time for reactive software,” in Proceedings of Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things Week 2023, 2023, pp. 313–318.
- E. Pöppel, K. Schill, and N. von Steinbüchel, “Sensory integration within temporally neutral systems states: a hypothesis,” Naturwissenschaften, vol. 77, no. 2, pp. 89–91, 1990.
- C. Stefanovic, P. Popovski, and D. Vukobratovic, “Frameless ALOHA protocol for wireless networks,” IEEE Communications Letters, vol. 16, no. 12, pp. 2087–2090, 2012.
- T. Wild, V. Braun, and H. Viswanathan, “Joint design of communication and sensing for beyond 5G and 6G systems,” IEEE Access, vol. 9, pp. 30 845–30 857, 2021.
Paper Prompts
Sign up for free to create and run prompts on this paper using GPT-5.
Top Community Prompts
Collections
Sign up for free to add this paper to one or more collections.