Joint LOS Identification and Data Association for 6G-Enabled Networked Device-Free Sensing

Abstract: This paper considers networked device-free sensing in an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) cellular system with multipath environment, where the passive targets reflect the downlink signals to the base stations (BSs) via non-line-of-sight (NLOS) paths and/or line-of-sight (LOS) paths, and the BSs share the sensing information extracted from their received echoes to jointly localize the targets. A two-phase localization protocol is considered. In Phase I, we design an efficient method that is able to accurately estimate the range of any path from a transmitting BS to a receiving BS via a target, even if the transmitting and receiving BSs are separated and not perfectly synchronized. In Phase II, we propose an effective method that is able to jointly identify the ranges of the LOS paths between the targets and the BSs as well as associate the ranges of LOS paths with the right targets, such that the number and the locations of the targets both can be accurately estimated. Numerical results verify that our proposed two-phase protocol can achieve high performance of networked sensing in the multipath environment.