Perceptive mobile network (PMN) is a recently proposed next-generation network that integrates radar sensing into communications. One major challenge for realizing sensing in PMNs is how to deal with spatially-separated asynchronous transceivers. The asynchrony between sensing receiver and transmitter will cause both timing offsets (TOs) and carrier frequency offsets (CFOs) and lead to degraded sensing accuracy in both ranging and velocity measurements. In this paper, we propose an uplink sensing scheme for PMNs with asynchronous transceivers, targeting at resolving the sensing ambiguity and improving the sensing accuracy. We first adopt a cross-antenna cross-correlation (CACC) operation to remove the sensing ambiguity associated with both TOs and CFOs. Without sensing ambiguity, both actual propagation delay and actual Doppler frequency of multiple targets can be obtained using CACC outputs. To exploit the redundancy of the CACC outputs and reduce the complexity, we then propose a novel mirrored-MUSIC algorithm, which halves the number of unknown parameters to be estimated, to obtain actual values of delays and Doppler frequencies. Finally, we propose a high-resolution angles-of-arrival (AoAs) estimation algorithm, which jointly processes all measurements from spatial, temporal, and frequency domains. The proposed AoAs estimation algorithm can achieve significantly higher estimation accuracy than that of using samples from the spatial domain only. We also derive the theoretical mean-square-error of the proposed algorithms. Numerical results are provided and validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

Joint communication and radar sensing (JCAS) integrates the two functions into one system, sharing one transmitted signal. In this paper, we investigate JCAS waveform optimization in communication-centric systems, where a base station (BS) detects radar targets and communicates with mobile users simultaneously. Different from existing works, we study multi-metric optimizations for a practical low-cost system and establish their connections. To relax the requirement of full-duplex technology, we add a single receive antenna for sensing at the BS, which is synchronized with and spatially separated from the JCAS transmit array. We first optimize precoders for communications and radar, individually. Then, we formulate a JCAS waveform optimization problem that constrains either mutual information (MI) or Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) of radar and maximizes the relaxed signal-to-interference-plus-noise rate (SINR) of communications. Exploiting the geometric characteristic of the relaxed SINR, we provide a closed-form solution under certain conditions and propose a numerical iteration algorithm that works in all situations. We also disclose the connections between optimizations with constraining MI and CRB, using numerical results. Finally, simulation results are provided and validate the proposed optimization solutions.

Joint communications and sensing (JCAS) have the potential to improve the overall energy, cost and frequency efficiency of Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems. As a first effort, we propose to optimize the MIMO-OFDM data symbols carried by sub-carriers for better time-and spatial-domain signal orthogonality. This can reduce inter-target and inter-antenna interference, enabling high-quality sensing. We establish an optimization problem that modifies data symbols on sub-carriers to enhance the above-mentioned signal orthogonality. We also develop an efficient algorithm to solve the problem based on the majorization-minimization framework. Moreover, we discover unique signal structures and features from the newly modeled problem, which substantially reduce the complexity of majorizing the objective function. We also develop new projectors to enforce the feasibility of the obtained solution. Simulations show that to achieve the same sensing performance, the optimized waveform can reduce the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) requirement by 3~4.5 dB compared with the original waveform, while the SNR loss for the uncoded bit error rate is only 1~1.5 dB.

Uplink sensing in perceptive mobile networks (PMNs), which uses uplink communication signals for sensing the environment around a base station, faces challenging issues of clock asynchronism and the requirement of a line-of-sight (LOS) path between transmitters and receivers. The channel state information (CSI) ratio has been applied to resolve these issues, however, current research on the CSI ratio is limited to Doppler estimation in a single dynamic path. This paper proposes an advanced parameter estimation scheme that can extract multiple dynamic parameters, including Doppler frequency, angle-of-arrival (AoA), and delay, in a communication uplink channel and completes the localization of multiple moving targets. Our scheme is based on the multi-element complex Taylor series of the CSI ratio that converts a nonlinear function of sensing parameters to linear forms and enables the applications of traditional sensing algorithms. Using the truncated Taylor series, we develop novel multiple-signal-classification grid searching algorithms for estimating Doppler frequencies and AoAs and use the least-square method to obtain delays. Both experimental and simulation results are provided, demonstrating that our proposed scheme can achieve good performances for sensing both single and multiple dynamic paths, without requiring the presence of a LOS path.

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) is a promising technique for next-generation mobile networks, offering reduced device size, power consumption, cost, and improved spectrum efficiency. Full realization of such benefits relies on waveform design and resource allocation. This paper focuses on frequency-time (FT) resource allocation of multi-user uplink ISAC systems by minimizing the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) of 5G new-radio signals. We first derive two types of CRBs for communications with respect to channel coefficients and parameters, respectively, and derive one CRB with respect to parameters for radar by removing the line-of-sight path and exploiting the shared parameters among different users' channels. Closed-form solutions to the FT resources are obtained under certain conditions for both radar and communication CRB minimizations, revealing the relationship and differences between the optimal radar and communication FT-resource allocations. Then, to balance the radar and communication CRB performance, we formulate two ISAC FT-resource optimization problems based on the two different communication CRBs and optimize FT resources accordingly. Finally, simulation results validate the effectiveness of the CRB optimization scheme.

Angle of Arrival (AoA) estimation with localized hybrid arrays is challenging in millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems. Most existing solutions quantize AoAs into limited values with relatively low accuracy. This paper presents a multi-AoA estimation scheme which is capable of estimating multiple AoAs from multiple users with low complexity. Specifically, we design a path filter via combining the received signals for each subarray. Each path filter enables a certain range of AoAs to pass through while suppressing the rest. Then we can use low-complexity cross-correlation operations to obtain continuous AoA estimates. Association of paths to users is further achieved by a follow-up pseudo-random codes based correlation operation. The scheme is first presented for a narrowband system and then extended to wideband with frequency selectivity. We also introduce new metrics and derive the lower bound of mean square error for evaluating the accuracy of AoA estimates, as conventional metrics face difficulties in the presence of multiple closely located AoAs. Extensive simulation results are provided and validate the effectiveness of the proposed multi-AoA estimation scheme.