The integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), in which the sensing and communication share the same frequency band and hardware, has emerged as a key technology in future wireless systems due to two main reasons. First, many important application scenarios in fifth generation (5G) and beyond, such as autonomous vehicles, Wi-Fi sensing and extended reality, requires both high-performance sensing and wireless communications. Second, with millimeter wave and massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technologies widely employed in 5G and beyond, the future communication signals tend to have high-resolution in both time and angular domain, opening up the possibility for ISAC. As such, ISAC has attracted tremendous research interest and attentions in both academia and industry. Early works on ISAC have been focused on the design, analysis and optimization of practical ISAC technologies for various ISAC systems. While this line of works are necessary, it is equally important to study the fundamental limits of ISAC in order to understand the gap between the current state-of-the-art technologies and the performance limits, and provide useful insights and guidance for the development of better ISAC technologies that can approach the performance limits. In this paper, we aim to provide a comprehensive survey for the current research progress on the fundamental limits of ISAC. Particularly, we first propose a systematic classification method for both traditional radio sensing (such as radar sensing and wireless localization) and ISAC so that they can be naturally incorporated into a unified framework. Then we summarize the major performance metrics and bounds used in sensing, communications and ISAC, respectively. After that, we present the current research progresses on fundamental limits of each class of the traditional sensing and ISAC systems. Finally, the open problems and future research directions are discussed.

The paper examines the problem of cancellation of direct signal, multipath and clutter echoes in passive bistatic radar (PBR). This problem is exacerbated as the transmitted waveform is not under control of the radar designer and the sidelobes of the ambiguity function can mask targets including those displaced in either (or both) range and Doppler from the disturbance. A novel multistage approach is developed for disturbance cancellation and target detection based on projections of the received signal in a subspace orthogonal to both the disturbance and previously detected targets. The resulting algorithm is shown to be effective against typical simulated scenarios with a limited number of stages, and a version with computational savings is also introduced. Finally its effectiveness is demonstrated with the application to real data acquired with an experimental VHF PBR system.

The practical feasibility of a WiFi transmissions based passive bistatic radar (PBR) is analyzed here. The required data processing steps are described including the adopted techniques for 1) the control of the signal autocorrelation function (ACF) usually yielding a high sidelobe level, and 2) the removal of the undesired signal contributions which strongly limit the useful dynamic range. The performance of the proposed techniques is firstly evaluated against simulated data generated according to the IEEE 802.11 Standards. Moreover the results are presented against a real data set collected by an experimental setup when using the conventional dual (reference and surveillance) channels PBR receiving scheme. This allows us to demonstrate the potentialities of a WiFi-based PBR for local area surveillance applications, where vehicles and people can be detected and tracked. Based on the digital nature of the exploited signals of opportunity, the attractive possibility is also investigated of avoiding the use of a dedicated receiving channel for the reference signal, by synthesizing it from the surveillance channel. This approach is shown to yield comparable performance with respect to the conventional PBR approach while yielding a remarkable saving in terms of system complexity.

The paper deals with the cancellation of direct signal, multipath and clutter echoes in passive radar, where the transmitted waveform is not under control of the radar designer and the sidelobes of the ambiguity function mask even targets largely displaced in range and Doppler from the disturbance. A sequential approach is presented for disturbance cancellation and target detection based on projections of the received signals in a subspace orthogonal to both disturbance and previously detected targets. Modeling the clutter spread on few Doppler bins allows complete clutter cancellation. The approach is shown to be effective against typical scenarios with a limited number of iterations.

In this paper we address the problem of clutter and multipath cancellation in passive radar. Different adaptive techniques are considered based on both well known approaches and innovative strategies proposed by the authors. The performance comparison allows to understand the particular behaviour of each technique in a practical scenario. The proposed innovative strategies are shown to be very appealing solutions for disturbance cancellation in passive radar.

Wireless transmission is becoming an increasingly widely available source of transmissions for passive radar detection. In this paper, we present a detailed analysis of the ambiguity function (AF) of a range of typical IEEE 802.11 signals obtained during a series of experimental trials. Theoretical analysis has been used to identify the average properties of basic signal types in terms of resolution and sidelobe levels in both the range and Doppler domains. The theoretical model of a range of typical 802.11 transmissions has been verified and range and Doppler resolutions have been investigated for a range of transmission types. It has been found that using Doppler with a suitable integration time can enable detection of typical personnel targets. A number of issues relating to the use of these transmissions have been identified during this study.