Joint Scattering Environment Sensing and Channel Estimation for Integrated Sensing and Communication

Abstract: This paper considers an integrated sensing and communication system, where some radar targets also serve as communication scatterers. A location domain channel modeling method is proposed based on the position of targets and scatterers in the scattering environment, and the resulting radar and communication channels exhibit a partially common sparsity. By exploiting this, we propose a joint scattering environment sensing and channel estimation scheme to enhance the target/scatterer localization and channel estimation performance simultaneously. Specifically, the base station (BS) first transmits downlink pilots to sense the targets in the scattering environment. Then the user transmits uplink pilots to estimate the communication channel. Finally, joint scattering environment sensing and channel estimation are performed at the BS based on the reflected downlink pilot signal and received uplink pilot signal. A message passing based algorithm is designed by combining the turbo approach and the expectation maximization method. The advantages of our proposed scheme are verified in the simulations.