Joint Positioning and Cooperative Wireless Sensing: Design and Over-The-Air Verification

The paradigm of wireless communications is shifting from data transfer to ubiquitous services. Perception of the surrounding environment has recently been highlighted as one of the key technologies enabling new applications, such as autonomous driving, extended reality, and healthcare. This movement gives a rise to an emerging concept of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), where the distributed communication nodes, such as the base station and user devices, serve as probes for wide-area sensing, and the wideband radio signals are shared between communication and sensing. In recent years, a lot of effort has been directed towards the two main pillars of ISAC, i.e., self-localization of a node (positioning) and detection of device-free objects around the node (sensing). Nevertheless, only few of them have been implemented and brought up for real-world verification. This paper provides our latest efforts on validating the feasibility of wireless positioning and sensing. Through over-the-air measurement and processing in a 5G NR millimeter network with a commercial grade user equipment (UE), we demonstrate that the NR positioning and sensing techniques are mature enough to drive the evolution toward perceptive and cognitive wireless communications.