Joint Data Association, NLOS Mitigation, and Clutter Suppression for Networked Device-Free Sensing in 6G Cellular Network

TL;DR

This paper proposes a networked device-free sensing framework for 6G cellular networks that uses base station cooperation to accurately localize targets by jointly addressing data association, NLOS mitigation, and clutter suppression in complex environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel joint data association, NLOS mitigation, and clutter suppression method enabling high-accuracy target localization in 6G networked sensing environments.

Findings

High localization accuracy achieved in multi-path environments

Effective mitigation of NLOS and clutter effects

Robust target localization with cooperative BS architecture

Abstract

Recently, there is a growing interest in achieving integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) in the sixth-generation (6G) cellular network. Inspired by this trend and the success of cooperative communication in cloud radio access network, this paper considers a networked device-free sensing architecture based on base station (BS) cooperation to transform the cellular network into a huge sensor that can provide ubiquitous and high-performance sensing services. Under this framework, the BSs first transmit the downlink communication signals to the mobile users and then estimate the range information of the targets based on their echoes. Next, a central processor collects the range information from all the BSs via the fronthaul links and localizes each target based on its distances to various BSs. To enable the above strategy in the 6G network, we will perform joint data association, non-line-of-sight (NLOS) mitigation, and clutter suppression, such that the central processor is able to find out the useful range estimations extracted from the line-of-sight (LOS) paths and match them to the right targets for localization. Numerical results show that our interested networked device-free sensing scheme for the 6G network can localize the targets with high accuracy in the challenging multi-path propagation environment.