Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) will become a service in future mobile communication networks. It enables the detection and recognition of passive objects and environments using radar-like sensing. The ultimate advantage is the reuse of the mobile network and radio access resources for scene illumination, sensing, data transportation, computation, and fusion. It enables building a distributed, ubiquitous sensing network that can be adapted for a variety of radio sensing tasks and services. In this article, we develop the principles of multi-sensor ISAC (MS-ISAC). MS-ISAC corresponds to multi-user MIMO communication, which in radar terminology is known as distributed MIMO radar. \ First, we develop basic architectural principles for MS-ISAC and link them to example use cases. We then propose a generic MS-ISAC architecture. After a brief reference to multipath propagation and multistatic target reflectivity issues, we outline multilink access, coordination, precoding and link adaptation schemes for MS-ISAC. Moreover, we review model-based estimation and tracking of delay~/~Doppler from sparse OFDMA~/~TDMA frames. We emphasize Cooperative Passive Coherent Location (CPCL) for bistatic correlation and synchronization. Finally, issues of multisensor node synchronization and distributed data fusion are addressed.
@article{arxiv.2511.13104,
title = {Distributed Multisensor ISAC},
author = {Reiner Thomä and Carsten Andrich and Michael Döbereiner and Reza Faramarzahangari and Jonas Gedschold and Marc Francisco Colaco Miranda and Saw James Myint and Steffen Schieler and Christian Schneider and Sebastian Semper and Carsten Smeenk and Gerd Sommerkorn and Zhixiang Zhao},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.13104},
year = {2025}
}