7 How to follow it yourself, and what the record will not tell you

7.1 Search by acronym, never by the word

This is the single most useful thing in the course, so it comes first.

"Sensing" is a word at least three other pieces of 3GPP work also use. 2053 documents in the local record say sensing and mean sidelink partial sensing, listen-before-talk channel sensing, or the separate 6G work ^[1].

Every number in this course was found by filtering on a work item acronym, and never by the word. Do the same. The fourteen acronyms, and which group each one belongs to, are the table in The map of the groups, and where the weight sat.

The acronym is also the only handle that survives time. A study item is reopened by a revision rather than replaced, so the document number of the paper that opened it changes while the acronym stays put — the revisions are listed in Where it stands, read off the paper trail.

7.2 Seven traps in these numbers

T1. Every count here is a floor. 440 documents whose title says "integrated sensing" or "ISAC" carry no work item acronym at all ^[2], and are in none of the figures — among them every plenary approval document and every proposal filed before a work item existed. So the 3492 documents that do carry an acronym are the floor of this subject, not its total ^[3].

T2. 78 documents carry no upload time, which is why the per-year figures add up to less than the total ^[4].

T3. "18 work items" and "14 acronyms" are both right. The work plan holds 18 entries ^[5] under 14 acronyms ^[6], because two acronyms have more than one entry.

T4. The RAN work item is filed twice, once as the feature NR_Sensing_bis and once as its core part NR_Sensing_bis-Core, both described by the same document. Only the core-part entry has a document against it.

T5. The oldest work item has no description on this machine. The SA1 study has a work plan entry and an approval document, but no work item description, so no objective and no leadership line is recorded for it FS_Sensing.

T6. CT3 has no entry, although the CT work item names it as doing half the job. No document at a CT3 meeting carries one of the acronyms yet ^[7].

T7. Two specifications were left out of the 27, because exactly one document names each and no work item does. One document is as likely a filing mistake as a real link ^[8].

7.3 The documents that opened each piece

If you want the shortest possible account of what somebody promised, read the document that opened the work. There is one per piece.

• SP-220084 opened the very first study, at SA#95-e

• SP-230750 opened the requirements work item at SA#100

• RP-234069 opened the radio channel-model study at RAN#102

• SP-250401 opened the architecture study at SA#107

• RP-251861 opened the second radio study at RAN#108

• SP-251242 opened the security study at SA#109

• SP-251044 is the revised study item for the application study, from SA#109; the document that first opened it is not in this register

• SP-251665 and SP-251668 opened the two SA5 studies at SA#110

• SP-260297 and SP-260317 opened the two SA rule-writing items at SA#111, RP-261566 the RAN one at RAN#112 and CP-261274 the CT one at CT#112

Every one of those has an objective, and every objective is in this course's source register with the document it came from — including the ones this course never quoted, for charging ^[9], management ^[10], security ^[11] and the application-layer specification ^[12].

7.4 What this record cannot tell you

The honest half of the course. None of the following is in the data, so nothing here should be read as an answer to it:

• No date for anything. Meeting codes and version numbers, never the day a release froze, a study ended or a document was published. "Release 20 completes in …" cannot be written from this.

• No person. The register carries the company or the role a document came from, never a human being's name.

• No reason for any decision. A document is approved, revised, noted, endorsed, postponed or withdrawn, and the record stops there. Why something was agreed, merged or dropped is not in it.

• No technical content of any study. Titles, scopes, objectives and counts, and nothing else. No key issue, no solution, no evaluation result, no number out of TR 38.765. What the studies concluded is in the reports.

• No comparison with any other area of 3GPP work. Nothing here measures positioning, or AI, or ambient IoT, so nothing here supports calling sensing the largest or the fastest anything.

And one standing caveat under all of it: these are counts of what this machine holds, not counts of what 3GPP holds.

7.5 Where to go next

Read in this order, and stop when you have what you came for.

• TS 22.137 first. It is short and it defines the words every later document uses.

• TR 22.837 for the use cases the subject started from.

• TR 23.700-14, then TS 23.137, for how the system is put together.

• TR 38.901 for the channel model and TR 38.765 for the radio evaluation.

• TR 33.777 for security and privacy.

This school does not carry the text of any of those. What it carries is the map: which document answers which question, which acronym finds the paperwork, and which numbers are floors rather than totals. The sources page of this course lists every entry behind every claim in it, and the detailed course in this track goes through the same material group by group.