Experimental Characterization of ISAC Channel Mapping and Environment Awareness

TL;DR

This paper addresses how monostatic ISAC sensing relates to bistatic communication channels in indoor mmWave environments by performing dense monostatic angular scans and bistatic measurements to recover a geometry-driven scatterer map. It extracts and back-projects MPCs to identify five dominant scatterers, then links bistatic MPCs (S1, S2) to specific scatterers via a predictive delay model $\Delta\tau(\mathbf{m})=\dfrac{\|\mathbf{m}-p_t\|+\|\mathbf{m}-p_r\| - d_{\rm LoS}}{c}$, demonstrating a deterministic sensing–communication correspondence. The wall and metal plate are characterized with measured RCSs of $\sigma_{\rm wall}=0.76$ dBsm and $\sigma_{\rm plate}=8.73$ dBsm, validating environment-aware channel reconstruction and physical interpretability. Overall, the results show that monostatic sensing enables geometry-resolved propagation modeling for ISAC, enabling joint perception and connectivity in practical indoor deployments.

Abstract

In the context of integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), this paper presents an experimental investigation of the relationship between monostatic sensing and naturally bistatic communication channels in an indoor millimeter-wave environment. We characterize the propagation channel in the joint delay--angle domain, extract dominant multipath components (MPCs) and associate them with physical scatterers in the environment, and demonstrate how communication MPCs can be explicitly recovered from sensing channels. Finally, the radar cross-sections (RCSs) of two key scatterers, namely the wall and metal plate, are obtained based on calibrated channel power and reconstructed propagation distances.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Indoor ISAC measurement setup revised from cuiisac: (a) monostatic scanning; (b) bistatic communication.
• Figure 2: Calibrated PADPs measured at (a) monostatic location $\text{Mono}1$ and (b) monostatic location $\text{Mono}2$.
• Figure 3: CDFs of RMS angular/delay spreads and their Normal fitted results for two monostatic locations.
• Figure 4: Extracted MPCs from two monostatic locations.
• Figure 5: Communication channel with components LoS, S1 and S2 under normalized delay.