Pilot-Based End-to-End Radio Positioning and Mapping for ISAC: Beyond Point-Based Landmarks

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel end-to-end radio positioning and mapping framework for ISAC that estimates extended environmental landmarks and effectively removes outliers, significantly enhancing environmental understanding for future 6G networks.

Contribution

It presents a new cooperative uplink framework that models extended landmarks and incorporates outlier removal, surpassing traditional point-based environmental modeling methods.

Findings

Improved environmental mapping accuracy with realistic ray-tracing data

Effective outlier removal enhances landmark estimation

Enhanced environmental attribute richness in the estimated maps

Abstract

Integrated sensing and communication enables simultaneous communication and sensing tasks, including precise radio positioning and mapping, essential for future 6G networks. Current methods typically model environmental landmarks as isolated incidence points or small reflection areas, lacking detailed attributes essential for advanced environmental interpretation. This paper addresses these limitations by developing an end-to-end cooperative uplink framework involving multiple base stations and users. Our method uniquely estimates extended landmark objects and incorporates obstruction-based outlier removal to mitigate multi-bounce signal effects. Validation using realistic ray-tracing data demonstrates substantial improvements in the richness of the estimated environmental map.