Joint Sensing and Communication for Situational Awareness in Wireless THz Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a joint sensing and communication framework for THz wireless systems that enhances indoor mapping, reliability, and data rates by leveraging reconfigurable surfaces and tensor decomposition, enabling efficient XR applications.

Contribution

It proposes a novel integrated sensing and communication approach using THz RISs and tensor-based environmental mapping, with no tradeoff between resolution and data rate.

Findings

Improved resolution and data rate are achievable simultaneously.

System reliability increases by up to 10% in mobile environments.

Joint optimization of sensing and communication enhances overall system performance.

Abstract

Next-generation wireless systems are rapidly evolving from communication-only systems to multi-modal systems with integrated sensing and communications. In this paper a novel joint sensing and communication framework is proposed for enabling wireless extended reality (XR) at terahertz (THz) bands. To gather rich sensing information and a higher line-of-sight (LoS) availability, THz-operated reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) acting as base stations are deployed. The sensing parameters are extracted by leveraging THz's quasi-opticality and opportunistically utilizing uplink communication waveforms. This enables the use of the same waveform, spectrum, and hardware for both sensing and communication purposes. The environmental sensing parameters are then derived by exploiting the sparsity of THz channels via tensor decomposition. Hence, a high-resolution indoor mapping is derived so as to characterize the spatial availability of communications and the mobility of users. Simulation results show that in the proposed framework, the resolution and data rate of the overall system are positively correlated, thus allowing a joint optimization between these metrics with no tradeoffs. Results also show that the proposed framework improves the system reliability in static and mobile systems. In particular, the highest reliability gains of 10% in reliability are achieved in a walking speed mobile environment compared to communication only systems with beam tracking.