AsyMov: Integrated Sensing and Communications with Asynchronous Moving Devices

Abstract: Estimating the Doppler frequency shift caused by moving targets is one of the key objectives of Integrated Sensing And Communication (ISAC) systems. In the case of Wi-Fi sensing, a reliable estimation of the Doppler enables applications such as target classification, human activity recognition, and gait analysis. However, in practical scenarios, Doppler estimation is hindered by the movement of transmitter and receiver devices, and by the phase offsets caused by their clock asynchrony. Existing approaches have separately addressed these two aspects, either assuming clock-synchronous moving devices or asynchronous static ones. Jointly tackling device motion and clock asynchrony is extremely challenging, as the Doppler shift from device movement differs for each propagation path and the phase offsets are time-varying. In this paper, we present AsyMov, a method to estimate the bistatic Doppler frequency of a target and the device velocity in ISAC setups featuring mobile and asynchronous devices. Our method leverages the channel impulse response at the receiver, by originally exploiting the invariance of phase offsets across propagation paths and the bistatic geometry. Moreover, AsyMov handles irregular channel sampling in the time domain and can be seamlessly integrated with device velocity measurements obtained from onboard sensors (if available), to enhance its reliability. AsyMov is thoroughly characterized from a theoretical perspective, via numerical simulation, and experimentally, implementing it on an IEEE 802.11ay testbed. Numerical and experimental results show superior performance against traditional methods based on the discrete Fourier transform and are on par with scenarios featuring static ISAC devices.