Environment Reconstruction based on Multi-User Selection and Multi-Modal Fusion in ISAC

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) has been deemed as a key technology for the sixth generation (6G) wireless communications systems. In this paper, we explore the inherent clustered nature of wireless users and design a multi-user based environment reconstruction scheme. Specifically, we first select users based on the estimation precision of channel's multipath, including the line-of-sight (LOS) and the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) paths, to enhance the accuracy of environment reconstruction. Then, we develop a fusion strategy that merges communications signalling with camera image to increase the accuracy and robustness of environment reconstruction. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve a remarkable sensing accuracy of centimeter level, which is about 17 times better than the scheme without user selection. Meanwhile, the fusion of communications data and vision data leads to a threefold accuracy improvement over the image only method, especially under challenging weather conditions like raining and snowing.

STAR-RIS Aided Integrated Sensing and Communication over High Mobility Scenario

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has become a promising technology for future communication system. In this paper, we consider a millimeter wave system over high mobility scenario, and propose a novel simultaneous transmission and reflection reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) aided ISAC scheme. To improve the communication service of the in-vehicle user equipment (UE) and simultaneously track and sense the vehicle with the help of nearby roadside units (RSUs), a STAR-RIS is equipped on the outside surface of the vehicle. Firstly, an efficient transmission structure is developed, where a number of training sequences with orthogonal precoders and combiners are respectively utilized at BS and RSUs for channel parameter extraction. Then, the near-field static channel model between the STAR-RIS and in-vehicle UE as well as the far-field time-frequency selective BS-RIS-RSUs channel model are characterized. By utilizing the multidimensional orthogonal matching pursuit (MOMP) algorithm, the cascaded channel parameters of the BS-RIS-RSUs links can be obtained at the RSUs. Thus, the vehicle localization and its velocity measurement can be acquired by jointly utilizing these extracted cascaded channel parameters of all RSUs. Note that the MOMP algorithm can be further utilized to extract the channel parameters of the BS-RIS-UE link for communication. With the help of sensing results, the phase shifts of the STAR-RIS are delicately designed, which can significantly improve the received signal strength for both the RSUs and the in-vehicle UE, and can finally enhance the sensing and communication performance. Moreover, the trade-off for sensing and communication is designed by optimizing the energy splitting factors of the STAR-RIS. Finally, simulation results are provided to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed STAR-RIS aided ISAC scheme.

Electromagnetic Property Sensing: A New Paradigm of Integrated Sensing and Communication

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has opened up numerous game-changing opportunities for realizing future wireless systems. In this paper, we develop a novel material sensing scheme that utilizes OFDM pilot signals in ISAC systems to sense the electromagnetic (EM) property and identify the material of the target. Specifically, we first establish an end-to-end EM propagation model by means of Maxwell equations, where the electrical properties of the material are captured by a closed-form expression for the non-line-of-sight (NLOS) channel, incorporating the Lippmann-Schwinger equation and the method of moments (MOM) for discretization. We then model the relative permittivity and conductivity distribution (RPCD) within a specified detection region. Based on the sensing model, we introduce a multi-frequency-based material sensing method by which the RPCD can be reconstructed from compressive sensing techniques that exploits the joint sparsity structure of the contrast source vector. To improve the sensing accuracy, we design a beamforming strategy from the communications transmitter based on the Born approximation, which can minimize the mutual coherence of the sensing matrix. The optimization problem is cast in terms of the Gram matrix and is solved iteratively to obtain the optimal beamforming matrix. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method in achieving high-quality RPCD reconstruction and accurate material classification. Furthermore, improvements in RPCD reconstruction quality and material classification accuracy are observed with increased signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or reduced target-transmitter distance.

6D Radar Sensing and Tracking in Monostatic Integrated Sensing and Communications System

In this paper, we propose a novel scheme for sixdimensional (6D) radar sensing and tracking of dynamic target based on multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) array for monostatic integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system. Unlike most existing ISAC studies believing that only the radial velocity of far-field dynamic target can be measured based on one single base station (BS), we find that the sensing echo channel of MIMO-ISAC system actually includes the distance, horizontal angle, pitch angle, radial velocity, horizontal angular velocity, and pitch angular velocity of the dynamic target. Thus we may fully rely on one single BS to estimate the dynamic target's 6D motion parameters from the sensing echo signals. Specifically, we first propose the long-term motion and short-term motion model of dynamic target, in which the short-term motion model serves the single-shot sensing of dynamic target, while the long-term motion model serves multiple-shots tracking of dynamic target. As a step further, we derive the sensing channel model corresponding to the short-term motion. Next, for singleshot sensing, we employ the array signal processing methods to estimate the dynamic target's horizontal angle, pitch angle, distance, and virtual velocity. By realizing that the virtual velocities observed by different antennas are different, we adopt plane fitting to estimate the radial velocity, horizontal angular velocity, and pitch angular velocity of dynamic target. Furthermore, we implement the multiple-shots tracking of dynamic target based on each single-shot sensing results and Kalman filtering. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed 6D radar sensing and tracking scheme.

A Low-Overhead Incorporation-Extrapolation based Few-Shot CSI Feedback Framework for Massive MIMO Systems

Accurate channel state information (CSI) is essential for downlink precoding at the base station (BS), especially for frequency FDD wideband massive MIMO systems with OFDM. In FDD systems, CSI is attained through CSI feedback from the user equipment (UE). However, large-scale antennas and large number of subcarriers significantly increase CSI feedback overhead. Deep learning-based CSI feedback methods have received tremendous attention in recent years due to their great capability of compressing CSI. Nonetheless, large amounts of collected samples are required to train deep learning models, which is severely challenging in practice. Besides, with the rapidly increasing number of antennas and subcarriers, most of these deep learning methods' CSI feedback overhead also grow dramatically, owing to their focus on full-dimensional CSI feedback. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a low-overhead Incorporation-Extrapolation based Few-Shot CSI feedback Framework (IEFSF) for massive MIMO systems. To further reduce the feedback overhead, a low-dimensional eigenvector-based CSI matrix is first formed with the incorporation process at the UE, and then recovered to the full-dimensional eigenvector-based CSI matrix at the BS via the extrapolation process. After that, to alleviate the necessity of the extensive collected samples and enable few-shot CSI feedback, we further propose a knowledge-driven data augmentation method and an artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) -based data augmentation method by exploiting the domain knowledge of wireless channels and by exploiting a novel generative model, respectively. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed IEFSF can significantly reduce CSI feedback overhead by 16 times compared with existing CSI feedback methods while maintaining higher feedback accuracy using only several hundreds of collected samples.

Integrated Sensing and Communications in Clutter Environment

In this paper, we propose a practical integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) framework to sense dynamic targets from clutter environment while ensuring users communications quality. To implement communications function and sensing function simultaneously, we design multiple communications beams that can communicate with the users as well as one sensing beam that can rotate and scan the entire space. To minimize the interference of sensing beam on existing communications systems, we divide the service area into sensing beam for sensing (S4S) sector and communications beam for sensing (C4S) sector, and provide beamforming design and power allocation optimization strategies for each type sector. Unlike most existing ISAC studies that ignore the interference of static environmental clutter on target sensing, we construct a mixed sensing channel model that includes both static environment and dynamic targets. When base station receives the echo signals, the mean phasor cancellation (MPC) method is employed to filter out the interference from static environmental clutter and to extract the effective dynamic target echoes. Then a complete and practical dynamic target sensing scheme is designed to detect the presence of dynamic targets and to estimate their angles, distances, and velocities. In particular, dynamic target detection and angle estimation are realized through angle-Doppler spectrum estimation (ADSE) and joint detection over multiple subcarriers (MSJD), while distance and velocity estimation are realized through the extended subspace algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and its superiority over the existing methods that ignore environmental clutter.

Moving Target Sensing for ISAC Systems in Clutter Environment

In this paper, we consider the moving target sensing problem for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems in clutter environment. Scatterers produce strong clutter, deteriorating the performance of ISAC systems in practice. Given that scatterers are typically stationary and the targets of interest are usually moving, we here focus on sensing the moving targets. Specifically, we adopt a scanning beam to search for moving target candidates. For the received signal in each scan, we employ high-pass filtering in the Doppler domain to suppress the clutter within the echo, thereby identifying candidate moving targets according to the power of filtered signal. Then, we adopt root-MUSIC-based algorithms to estimate the angle, range, and radial velocity of these candidate moving targets. Subsequently, we propose a target detection algorithm to reject false targets. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of these proposed methods.

Beam Squint Assisted User Localization in Near-Field Integrated Sensing and Communications Systems

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has been regarded as a key technology for 6G wireless communications, in which large-scale multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) array with higher and wider frequency bands will be adopted. However, recent studies show that the beam squint phenomenon can not be ignored in wideband MIMO system, which generally deteriorates the communications performance. In this paper, we find that with the aid of true-time-delay lines (TTDs), the range and trajectory of the beam squint in near-field communications systems can be freely controlled, and hence it is possible to reversely utilize the beam squint for user localization. We derive the trajectory equation for near-field beam squint points and design a way to control such trajectory. With the proposed design, beamforming from different subcarriers would purposely point to different angles and different distances, such that users from different positions would receive the maximum power at different subcarriers. Hence, one can simply localize multiple users from the beam squint effect in frequency domain, and thus reduce the beam sweeping overhead as compared to the conventional time domain beam search based approach. Furthermore, we utilize the phase difference of the maximum power subcarriers received by the user at different frequencies in several times beam sweeping to obtain a more accurate distance estimation result, ultimately realizing high accuracy and low beam sweeping overhead user localization. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.

Radar Sensing via OTFS Signaling

By multiplexing information symbols in the delay-Doppler (DD) domain, orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) is a promising candidate for future wireless communication in high-mobility scenarios. In addition to the superior communication performance, OTFS is also a natural choice for radar sensing since the primary parameters (range and velocity of targets) in radar signal processing can be inferred directly from the delay and Doppler shifts. Though there are several works on OTFS radar sensing, most of them consider the integer parameter estimation only, while the delay and Doppler shifts are usually fractional in the real world. In this paper, we propose a two-step method to estimate the fractional delay and Doppler shifts. We first perform the two-dimensional (2D) correlation between the received and transmitted DD domain symbols to obtain the integer parts of the parameters. Then a difference-based method is implemented to estimate the fractional parts of delay and Doppler indices. Meanwhile, we implement a target detection method based on a generalized likelihood ratio test since the number of potential targets in the sensing scenario is usually unknown. The simulation results show that the proposed method can obtain the delay and Doppler shifts accurately and get the number of sensing targets with a high detection probability.

YOLO: An Efficient Terahertz Band Integrated Sensing and Communications Scheme with Beam Squint

Using communications signals for localization is an important component of integrated sensing and communications (ISAC). In this paper, we propose to utilize the beam squint phenomenon to realize fast non-cooperative target localization in massive MIMO Terahertz band communications systems. Specifically, we construct the wideband channel model of the echo signal, and design a beamforming scheme that controls the range of beam squint by adjusting the values of phase shifters and true time delay lines (TTDs). By doing this, beams at different subcarriers can be aligned along different directions in a planned way. The received echo signals of different subcarriers will carry target information in different directions, based on which the targets' angles can be estimated through sophisticatedly designed algorithm. Moreover, we propose a supporting OFDM ranging algorithm that can estimate the targets' distances by comparing the theoretical phases and measured phases of the echo signals. Interestingly, the proposed localization method only needs the base station to transmit and receive the signals once, which can be termed You Only Listen Once (YOLO). Compared with the traditional ISAC method that requires multiple times beam sweeping, the proposed one greatly reduces the sensing overhead. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.