With the rapid development of the smart city, high-level autonomous driving, intelligent manufacturing, and etc., the stringent industrial-level requirements of the extremely low latency and high reliability for communication and new trends for sub-centimeter sensing have transcended the abilities of 5G and call for the development of 6G. Based on analyzing the function design of the communication, sensing and the emerging intelligent computation systems, we propose the joint communication, sensing and computation (JCSC) framework for 6G intelligent machine-type communication (IMTC) network to realize low latency and high reliability of communication, highly accurate sensing and fast environment adaption. In the proposed JCSC framework, the communication, sensing and computation abilities cooperate to benefit each other by utilizing the unified hardware, resource and protocol design. Sensing information is exploited as priori information to enhance the reliability and latency performance of wireless communication and to optimize the resource utilization of the communication network, which further improves the distributed computation and cooperative sensing ability. We propose the promising enabling technologies such as joint communication and sensing (JCS) technique, JCSC wireless networking techniques and intelligent computation techniques. We also summarize the challenges to achieve the JCSC framework. Then, we introduce the intelligent flexible manufacturing as a typical use case of the IMTC with JCSC framework, where the enabling technologies are deployed. Finally, we present the simulation results to prove the feasibility of the JCSC framework by evaluating the JCS waveform, the JCSC enabled neighbor discovery (ND) and medium access control (MAC).

翻译：随着智慧城市、高级自动驾驶、智能制造等领域的快速发展，通信领域对极低时延与超高可靠性的严苛工业级需求，以及亚厘米级感知的新趋势已超越5G能力边界，亟需发展6G技术。在分析通信、感知及新兴智能计算系统功能设计的基础上，本文提出面向6G智能机器类通信（IMTC）网络的联合通信、感知与计算（JCSC）框架，旨在实现低时延高可靠通信、高精度感知与快速环境自适应。在该框架中，通信、感知与计算能力通过统一硬件、资源与协议设计实现协同互惠：感知信息作为先验信息提升无线通信的可靠性与时延性能，同时优化通信网络资源利用率，进而增强分布式计算与协同感知能力。本文提出了联合通信与感知（JCS）技术、JCSC无线组网技术及智能计算技术等关键使能技术，并总结了实现JCSC框架面临的挑战。随后，以JCSC框架赋能的IMTC典型应用场景——智能柔性制造为例，阐述了使能技术的部署方案。最后，通过评估JCS波形、JCSC赋能邻居发现（ND）及介质访问控制（MAC）的仿真结果，验证了JCSC框架的可行性。