Organizations: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras, Chennai India · Centre of Excellence in Wireless Technology (CEWiT), Chennai India
Abstract
Future integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) architectures separate the sensing entity (SE) that acquires measurements from the sensing function (SF) that performs inference, creating a need for compact, task-oriented feedback on the SE-SF interface. Forwarding the raw channel frequency response or full per-link delay-Doppler-azimuth-elevation (DDAE) tensor is prohibitively expensive, while peak-only reporting discards target-discriminative structure under clutter. We propose a learning-based coarse-to-fine sensing pipeline with candidate-latent feedback for single-target estimation. At the SE, a lightweight convolutional scorer produces a dense delay-Doppler proposal map from pilot-based OFDM channel estimates, and a learned encoder constructs K compact C-dimensional candidate tokens by fusing per-candidate azimuth-elevation patches, normalized position, and confidence cues. The latents are uniformly quantized post-training to b bits and transmitted under a finite budget B_fb = bKC + 18K + 16 bits to the SF, which performs cross-candidate refinement, reranking, and joint four-parameter estimation. On a ray-traced urban scene with static and dynamic clutter, three operating points in the (K, C, b) design space achieve 96.33-98.88% detection at 107-806 bytes per coherent processing interval, compression ratios of 1.2-9.2 x 10^4 over the 8-bit DDAE magnitude tensor, reducing the SE-SF interface from multi-Gbit/s to sub-Mbit/s rates. Cross-scene evaluation on an independent campus-scale environment achieves 98.79-99.50% detection and at-or-better angular accuracy without retraining, indicating that the learned representation captures target-relevant structure that transports across scenes of comparable or lower clutter density.
Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM)-based integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems commonly extract target parameters by peak-searching a delay-Doppler map (DDM) constructed from reflected pilots. In multi-target scenarios, this results in ambiguity: the DDM does not reveal which physical target produced which peak, and two targets within the same delay-Doppler resolution cell cannot be separated. We propose a vision-assisted OFDM-ISAC framework that resolves both limitations by fusing wireless and visual modalities. The transmitter encodes an onboard street-view image with deep joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) and transmits it over the same OFDM waveform used for sensing; the receiver reconstructs the image, runs a fine-tuned YOLOv5 detector and fuses the resulting per-target features (bounding-box coordinates and class labels) with the DDM and transmitter-receiver geometry through a learned multi-modal network. To stabilize training of the high dimensional delay and Doppler classifiers, we introduce a Kullback Leibler loss against triangular soft labels centered on the ground-truth bin. On a Blender-rendered vehicular testbed, the proposed framework achieves a 16 cm localization root mean square error (RMSE) and a 10.8 ns delay RMSE. An ablation study confirms that removing the visual modality causes a 60x degradation in localization. These results highlight the potential of vision to overcome the data-association and resolution limits of single-modality ISAC.
With the growing demand for satellite sensing and communication, the limited wireless resources are difficult to support multiple satellite systems. Therefore, it is desired to investigate integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) in low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite systems to enable multi-functionality within a single satellite, thereby saving both spectrum and orbital resources. In this paper, a framework for ISAC in LEO satellite systems is established, where a satellite can simultaneously sense multiple targets and serve multiple communication users (CUs) over the same spectrum. Considering the limited onboard energy of satellite, a novel robust beamforming design algorithm is developed with the goal of minimizing total transmit power while satisfying the mean squared error (MSE) requirements for sensing and signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirements for communication in presence of channel phase uncertainty which exacerbates the cross-functional interference. According to theoretical analysis, the proposed algorithm for ISAC in LEO satellite systems is effective. Moreover, extensive simulations confirm the superiority of the proposed algorithm over baselines.
In this paper, we study an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where a UAV enhances the sensing capability of a base station (BS) towards a target while ensuring reliable communication towards a downlink user. This architecture is practically attractive for future wireless networks due to the UAV's controllable mobility and adaptive sensing coverage in wireless environments. The sensing performance is characterized by the average Cramér-Rao bound (CRB), which quantifies the minimum variance of the unbiased angle-of-arrival estimation. To enhance the sensing performance, the UAV trajectory and beamforming parameters are jointly optimized under power and mobility constraints, while satisfying communication requirements to the downlink user. To address the resulting non-convex problem, we employ null-space projection for beamforming design and adopt deep reinforcement learning for the trajectory optimization over a discrete-time scale. In each time slot, beamforming is optimized based on the channel state information to improve CRB performance while mitigating interference between the BS and the communication user. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly reduces the time-averaged CRB by over 10%, compared with the ISAC system without UAV assistance, and also achieves a higher sensing accuracy than both the fixed-UAV-trajectory and the maximum-ratio-transmission-based beamforming benchmarks.