School of Specs Sensing — the network as a radarIn depth

Reading the record yourself · chapter 13 of 14 · 7 minutes

13 How to follow this area yourself

The acronyms to search for, how document and meeting numbers are built, the four traps that make this subject hard to search, and the order to read things in.

13.1 Everything in this course is repeatable

Nothing here came from a person, a briefing or a summary. It came from searching a document database by work item acronym and reading what came back. Anybody can do the same, and this chapter is how.

13.2 The fourteen acronyms

Search by acronym, never by word. These are the fourteen, and the count each one returns in this record:

Acronym Documents What it is
FS_Sensing_NR 776 [2] RAN1 channel-model study
FS_Sensing_ARC 706 [3] SA2 architecture study
FS_Sensing 521 [4] SA1 use-case study
FS_Sensing_NR_bis 407 [5] RAN1 radio study
Sensing-ARC 302 [6] SA2 rule-writing
FS_Sensing_SEC 227 [7] SA3 security study
FS_Sensing_APP 215 [8] SA6 application study
Sensing 128 [9] SA1 rule-writing
Sensing-APP 75 [10] SA6 rule-writing
FS_Sensing_CH 67 [11] SA5 charging study
FS_Sensing_OAM 61 [12] SA5 management study
Sensing-CT 9 [13] CT4 rule-writing
NR_Sensing_bis-Core 1 [14] RAN3 rule-writing, core part
NR_Sensing_bis none yet RAN3 rule-writing, the feature

Two spelling habits are worth memorising. Every acronym here that starts FS_ is a study, and every one that does not is rule-writing — so FS_Sensing_ARC is the homework and Sensing-ARC is the rule-writing that followed it. And _bis marks a second, separate piece of work on the same subject: FS_Sensing_NR_bis is not a revision of FS_Sensing_NR, it is another study with its own report.

13.3 How the numbers are built

Every document number in this area is a prefix and a number. The prefix says where it was filed.

Prefix Where Example
SP- the SA plenary SP-260297 SP-260297
RP- the RAN plenary RP-261566 RP-261566
CP- the CT plenary CP-261274 CP-261274
S1- S2- S3- S6- SA working groups S2-2511045 S2-2511045
R1- R3- RAN working groups R3-261541 R3-261541
C4- CT4 none cited in this course

Meetings are written the same way in reverse: a group and a number. SA1#98-e, SA2#175, RAN1#126, RAN3#129-bis, CT4#135. The -e and -bis suffixes are part of the meeting's name, not a version of it.

A plenary meeting drops the working-group digit: SA#111 and RAN#112 are plenaries, SA1#109 and RAN1#126 are working groups. That one character is the difference between a decision and a proposal.

13.4 The four traps

T1. The word "sensing" is used by other work. 2053 documents in this record say sensing and mean sidelink partial sensing, listen-before-talk channel sensing or the separate 6G work [15]. A search by word returns a pile that is mostly not this subject. Search by acronym.

T2. Searching by acronym misses the approvals. 440 documents whose titles say "integrated sensing" or "ISAC" carry no acronym at all [16] — every plenary approval document among them, and everything filed before a work item existed to file it under. So run both searches, by acronym and by title, and expect them to disagree.

T3. Entries and acronyms are different counts. 18 entries in the work plan [17] under 14 acronyms [18]: three entries share Sensing, three share Sensing-CT, and the radio work item is filed twice as a feature and a core part. Say which you mean, every time.

T4. The work plan points at the newest revision, not the opener. RP-253246 is what the work plan shows for the second radio study RP-253246; RP-251861 is what opened it RP-251861. If you want the original promise, follow the chain back.

One smaller trap, for anybody doing arithmetic: 78 documents carry no upload time at all [19], which is why per-year counts never add up to the total.

13.5 Ten minutes, from nothing

Somebody says "ISAC" in a meeting and you have ten minutes before you have to have an opinion. This is the order that works.

  • M1. Search the document database for the acronym Sensing-ARC and sort by newest. Its 302 documents are the architecture rule-writing, and that is where the centre of gravity currently is [6].

  • M2. Find the work item description it points at, SP-260297, and read the objective SP-260297. Two minutes, and you now know what SA2 has promised.

  • M3. Look up the state of TS 23.137 TS 23.137. If it is still below 1.0.0, nothing is settled.

  • M4. Count the sensing change requests against TS 23.501 TS 23.501. That tells you whether the rest of 5G has noticed yet.

Four steps and no specification text read. You will not know what sensing does, but you will know exactly how finished it is, which is usually the question actually being asked in the room.

13.6 Reading order

For somebody starting from nothing and wanting to be useful in a conversation about this area within a day:

  • A1. TS 22.137 TS 22.137 — short, and it defines the words.

  • A2. TR 22.837 TR 22.837 — the use cases, for what was hoped for.

  • A3. TR 23.700-14 TR 23.700-14, then TS 23.137 TS 23.137 — how the system is put together, and how narrow the first build is.

  • A4. TR 38.901 TR 38.901 and TR 38.765 TR 38.765 — the channel model and the radio evaluation.

  • A5. TR 33.777 TR 33.777 — security and privacy, which is where the uncomfortable questions live.

13.7 Then follow what happens next

The work item descriptions are the shortest statement of what each group promised, and there are four to watch:

What you get when you open one is short and unglamorous. This is SA5's charging study, in full as the register carries it:

Twelve of the fourteen acronyms have their objective in this course's register, word for word, with the document it came from.

Group Its objectives in the register
SA1 Sensing [20]
RAN1 FS_Sensing_NR [21] and FS_Sensing_NR_bis [22]
SA2 FS_Sensing_ARC [23] and Sensing-ARC [24]
RAN3 NR_Sensing_bis [25]
SA3 FS_Sensing_SEC [26]
SA6 FS_Sensing_APP [27] and Sensing-APP [28]
SA5 FS_Sensing_CH [1] and FS_Sensing_OAM [29]
CT4 Sensing-CT [30]

Two of the fourteen acronyms are not in that table. FS_Sensing, the oldest study, has no work item description on this machine, so no objective is recorded for it at all FS_Sensing. And NR_Sensing_bis-Core is the core part of the RAN work item, described by the same document as NR_Sensing_bis NR_Sensing_bis-Core.

13.8 Where to read the real thing

Everything named in this chapter lives in 3GPP's own document folders and specification pages. This school carries the text of none of it, on purpose: the value here is knowing which of several thousand documents to open, not having a stale copy of one.

Last chapter, and the most important one for anybody who intends to quote this course: what the record cannot tell you — What the record cannot tell you.

Where the numbers in this chapter come from

  1. the objective of FS_Sensing_CH section 4 of the work item description /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/data/wis/1100013/SP-251665 was SP-251364_was_S5-255692 New SID on 5GA Charging Aspects of integrated sensing and communications.md, read 2026-08-04
  2. 776 documents carrying the work item FS_Sensing_NR rows of the tdoc table whose work item acronym column names FS_Sensing_NR; the first and last meeting are those of its earliest and latest upload time, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  3. 706 documents carrying the work item FS_Sensing_ARC rows of the tdoc table whose work item acronym column names FS_Sensing_ARC; the first and last meeting are those of its earliest and latest upload time, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  4. 521 documents carrying the work item FS_Sensing rows of the tdoc table whose work item acronym column names FS_Sensing; the first and last meeting are those of its earliest and latest upload time, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  5. 407 documents carrying the work item FS_Sensing_NR_bis rows of the tdoc table whose work item acronym column names FS_Sensing_NR_bis; the first and last meeting are those of its earliest and latest upload time, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  6. 302 documents carrying the work item Sensing-ARC rows of the tdoc table whose work item acronym column names Sensing-ARC; the first and last meeting are those of its earliest and latest upload time, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  7. 227 documents carrying the work item FS_Sensing_SEC rows of the tdoc table whose work item acronym column names FS_Sensing_SEC; the first and last meeting are those of its earliest and latest upload time, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  8. 215 documents carrying the work item FS_Sensing_APP rows of the tdoc table whose work item acronym column names FS_Sensing_APP; the first and last meeting are those of its earliest and latest upload time, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  9. 128 documents carrying the work item Sensing rows of the tdoc table whose work item acronym column names Sensing; the first and last meeting are those of its earliest and latest upload time, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  10. 75 documents carrying the work item Sensing-APP rows of the tdoc table whose work item acronym column names Sensing-APP; the first and last meeting are those of its earliest and latest upload time, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  11. 67 documents carrying the work item FS_Sensing_CH rows of the tdoc table whose work item acronym column names FS_Sensing_CH; the first and last meeting are those of its earliest and latest upload time, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  12. 61 documents carrying the work item FS_Sensing_OAM rows of the tdoc table whose work item acronym column names FS_Sensing_OAM; the first and last meeting are those of its earliest and latest upload time, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  13. 9 documents carrying the work item Sensing-CT rows of the tdoc table whose work item acronym column names Sensing-CT; the first and last meeting are those of its earliest and latest upload time, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  14. 1 documents carrying the work item NR_Sensing_bis-Core rows of the tdoc table whose work item acronym column names NR_Sensing_bis-Core; the first and last meeting are those of its earliest and latest upload time, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  15. 2053 documents say sensing but mean other work documents whose title contains "sensing" but neither "integrated sensing" nor "ISAC", and which carry some other work item — sidelink partial sensing, listen-before-talk channel sensing and the 6G studies, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  16. 440 Sensing documents carry no work item acronym documents whose title contains "integrated sensing" or "ISAC" and whose work item acronym column is empty — proposals filed before a work item existed, and every plenary approval document, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  17. 18 Sensing entries in the work plan folders under /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/data/wis whose metadata names this subject, read 2026-08-04
  18. 14 Sensing work item acronyms distinct acronyms over the 18 Sensing work item folders under /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/data/wis, read 2026-08-04
  19. 78 Sensing documents carry no upload time Sensing documents whose upload column is empty, which is why the per-year counts do not add up to the total, asked of /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/database/api/api.sqlite on 2026-08-04
  20. the objective of Sensing section 4 of the work item description /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/data/wis/1000026/SP-230750.md, read 2026-08-04
  21. the objective of FS_Sensing_NR section 4 of the work item description /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/data/wis/1020086/RP-242348 Revised SID for ISAC -cl.md, read 2026-08-04
  22. the objective of FS_Sensing_NR_bis section 4 of the work item description /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/data/wis/1080070/RP-253246 revised SID on NR ISAC -cl.md, read 2026-08-04
  23. the objective of FS_Sensing_ARC section 4 of the work item description /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/data/wis/1070012/SP-250809_SP-250790_SP-250481_S2-2505409_Update SID_Rel-20 Sensing_cl.md, read 2026-08-04
  24. the objective of Sensing-ARC section 4 of the work item description /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/data/wis/1110021/SP-260297_S2-2600957_new WID on Sensing-ARC.md, read 2026-08-04
  25. the objective of NR_Sensing_bis section 4 of the work item description /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/data/wis/1120123/RP-261566.md, read 2026-08-04
  26. the objective of FS_Sensing_SEC section 4 of the work item description /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/data/wis/1090020/SP-251242_New SID on Security Aspects of Sensing.md, read 2026-08-04
  27. the objective of FS_Sensing_APP section 4 of the work item description /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/data/wis/1080028/SP-251044_cl_Revised_SID_on_Study_on_Utilization_of_Sensing_Results_for_Vertical_Applications.md, read 2026-08-04
  28. the objective of Sensing-APP section 4 of the work item description /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/data/wis/1110051/SP-260317_was_260180_Use_of_Sensing_results_for_Vertical_Applications.md, read 2026-08-04
  29. the objective of FS_Sensing_OAM section 4 of the work item description /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/data/wis/1100015/SP-251668 was SP-251366_was_S5-255707 New SID on Management aspects of Integrated Sensing and Communication.md, read 2026-08-04
  30. the objective of Sensing-CT section 4 of the work item description /var/www/whatthespec.net/data/data/wis/1120002/CP-261274-CP-261017.md, read 2026-08-04

Every source this course is built on

Check yourself

Answers appear when you pick one, with where they come from.

Q13.1 Why is searching for the word "sensing" the wrong way to find this work?

Q13.2 What does searching by acronym miss?

Q13.3 Which acronym returns the most documents?

Q13.4 A document number starting RP- comes from where?

Q13.5 What is the shortest document that says what a group has promised to do?

This chapter was built from a source register generated 2026-08-04. A fresher build of the register may hold different numbers.