An Experimental Proof of Concept for Integrated Sensing and Communications Waveform Design

The integration of sensing and communication (ISAC) functionalities have recently gained significant research interest as a hardware-, power-, spectrum- and cost- efficient solution. This experimental work implements a dual-functional sensing and communication framework where a single radiation waveform, either omnidirectional or directional, can realize both sensing and communication functions. We design an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based multi-user multiple input multiple output (MIMO) software-defined radio (SDR) testbed to validate the dual-functional model. We carry out over-the-air experiments to investigate the optimal trade-off factor to balance the performance for both functions. On the communication side, we obtain bit error rate (BER) results from the testbed to show the communication performance using the dual-functional waveform. On the sensing performance, we measure the output beampatterns of our transmission to examine their similarity to simulation based beampatterns. We also implement a sensing experiment to realize activity detection functions. Our experiment reveals that the dual-functional approach can achieve comparable BER performance with pure communication-based solutions while achieving fine sensing beampatterns and realistic sensing functionality simultaneously.