Underlaid Sensing Pilot for Integrated Sensing and Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel 2D underlaid sensing pilot for integrated sensing and communications in OFDM systems, enabling simultaneous sensing and data transmission with minimal power sharing and maintaining communication performance.

Contribution

It proposes a new 2D pilot signal design on the delay-Doppler plane for integrated sensing and communications, enhancing resource sharing and sensing capabilities.

Findings

Effective sensing performance demonstrated

Minimal power sharing preserves communication quality

Flexible adaptation to delay-Doppler resolutions

Abstract

This paper investigates a novel underlaid sensing pilot signal design for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) in an OFDM-based communication system. The proposed two-dimensional (2D) pilot signal is first generated on the delay-Doppler (DD) plane and then converted to the time-frequency (TF) plane for multiplexing with the OFDM data symbols. The sensing signal underlays the OFDM data, allowing for the sharing of time-frequency resources. In this framework, sensing detection is implemented based on a simple 2D correlation, taking advantage of the favorable auto-correlation properties of the sensing pilot. In the communication part, the sensing pilot, served as a known signal, can be utilized for channel estimation and equalization to ensure optimal symbol detection performance. The underlaid sensing pilot demonstrates good scalability and can adapt to different delay and Doppler resolution requirements without violating the OFDM frame structure. Experimental results show the effective sensing performance of the proposed pilot, with only a small fraction of power shared from the OFDM data, while maintaining satisfactory symbol detection performance in communication.