ELAA-ISAC: Environmental Mapping Utilizing the LoS State of Communication Channel

In this paper, a novel environmental mapping method is proposed to outline the indoor layout utilizing the line-of-sight (LoS) state information of extremely large aperture array (ELAA) channels. It leverages the spatial resolution provided by ELAA and the mobile terminal (MT)'s mobility to infer the presence and location of obstacles in the environment. The LoS state estimation is formulated as a binary hypothesis testing problem, and the optimal decision rule is derived based on the likelihood ratio test. Subsequently, the theoretical error probability of LoS estimation is derived, showing close alignment with simulation results. Then, an environmental mapping method is proposed, which progressively outlines the layout by combining LoS state information from multiple MT locations. It is demonstrated that the proposed method can accurately outline the environment layout, with the mapping accuracy improving as the number of service-antennas and MT locations increases. This paper also investigates the impact of channel estimation error and non-LoS (NLoS) components on the quality of environmental mapping. The proposed method exhibits particularly promising performance in LoS dominated wireless environments characterized by high Rician <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$K$</tex>-factor. Specifically, it achieves an average intersection over union (IoU) exceeding 80% when utilizing 256 service antennas and 18 MT locations.