Networked Collaborative Sensing Using Multi-Domain Measurements: Architectures, Performance Limits and Algorithms

As a promising 6G technology, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) gains growing interest. ISAC provides integration gain via sharing spectrum, hardware, and software. However, concerns exist regarding its sensing performance when compared to the dedicated radar. To address this issue, the advantages of widely deployed networks should be utilized. This paper proposes networked collaborative sensing (NCS) using multi-domain measurements (MM), including range, Doppler, and two-dimension angles. For the NCS-MM architecture, this paper proposes a novel multi-domain decoupling model and a novel guard band-based protocol. The proposed model simplifies multi-domain derivations and algorithm designs, and the proposed protocol conserves resources and mitigates NCS interference. In terms of performance limits, this paper derives the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of position and velocity estimations in NCS-MM. An accumulated single-dimension channel model is proposed, which is proven to be equivalent to that of the multi-dimension model. The algorithms of both MM estimation and fusion are proposed. An arbitrary-dimension Newtonized orthogonal matched pursuit (AD-NOMP) is proposed to accurately estimate grid-less MM. The degree-of-freedom (DoF) of MM is analyzed, and a novel DoF-based two-stage weighted least squares (TSWLS) is proposed to reduce complexity without DoF loss. The numerical results show that the proposed algorithms approach their performance limits.