An Experimental Proof of Concept for Integrated Sensing and Communications Waveform Design

TL;DR

This paper presents an experimental proof of concept for a dual-functional waveform that combines radar sensing and communication using OFDM-based MIMO SDR testbed, demonstrating balanced performance through over-the-air experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a practical dual-functional radar and communication waveform design validated through real-world over-the-air experiments, highlighting the trade-off management.

Findings

Dual-functional waveform achieves comparable BER to pure communication solutions.

Radar beampatterns closely match simulation results.

Effective trade-off factor balances radar and communication performance.

Abstract

The integration of sensing and communication (ISAC) functionalities have recently gained significant research interest as a hardware-, power-, spectrum- and cost- efficient solution. This experimental work focuses on a dual-functional radar sensing and communication framework where a single radiation waveform, either omnidirectional or directional, can realize both radar sensing and communication functions. We study a trade-off approach that can balance the performance of communications and radar sensing. We design an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based multi-user multiple input multiple output (MIMO) software-defined radio (SDR) testbed to validate the dual-functional model. We carry out over-the-air experiments to investigate the optimal trade-off factor to balance the performance for both functions. On the radar performance, we measure the output beampatterns of our transmission to examine their similarity to simulation based beampatterns. On the communication side, we obtain bit error rate (BER) results from the testbed to show the communication performance using the dual-functional waveform. Our experiment reveals that the dual-functional approach can achieve comparable BER performance with pure communication-based solutions while maintaining fine radar beampatterns simultaneously.