Integrated Sensing and Communication Enabled Cooperative Passive Sensing Using Mobile Communication System

TL;DR

This paper proposes a multi-BS cooperative passive sensing scheme for 6G ISAC systems, addressing synchronization challenges and enhancing sensing accuracy through novel signal processing and fusion methods.

Contribution

It introduces a non-line of sight and line of sight signal cross-correlation method and a symbol-level multi-BS sensing information fusion technique for improved passive sensing.

Findings

Achieves an order of magnitude higher sensing accuracy than single-BS sensing.

Effectively mitigates CFO and TO in multi-BS passive sensing.

Reduces computational complexity with a joint AoA and AoD estimation method.

Abstract

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a potential technology of the sixth-generation (6G) mobile communication system, which enables communication base station (BS) with sensing capability. However, the performance of single-BS sensing is limited, which can be overcome by multi-BS cooperative sensing. There are three types of multi-BS cooperative sensing, including cooperative active sensing, cooperative passive sensing, and cooperative active and passive sensing, where the multi-BS cooperative passive sensing has the advantages of low hardware modification cost and large sensing coverage. However, multi-BS cooperative passive sensing faces the challenges of synchronization offsets mitigation and sensing information fusion. To address these challenges, a non-line of sight (NLoS) and line of sight (LoS) signal cross-correlation (NLCC) method is proposed to mitigate carrier frequency offset (CFO) and time offset (TO). Besides, a symbol-level multi-BS sensing information fusion method is proposed. The discrete samplings of echo signals from multiple BSs are matched independently and coherent accumulated to improve sensing accuracy. Moreover, a lowcomplexity joint angle-of-arrival (AoA) and angle-of-departure (AoD) estimation method is proposed to reduce the computational complexity. Simulation results show that symbol-level multi-BS cooperative passive sensing scheme has an order of magnitude higher sensing accuracy than single-BS passive sensing. This work provides a reference for the research on multi-BS cooperative passive sensing.