Bistatic Sensing in 5G NR

Abstract: In this work, we propose and evaluate the performance of a 5th generation (5G) New Radio (NR) bistatic Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISaC) system. Unlike the full-duplex monostatic ISaC systems, the bistatic approach enables sensing in the current cellular networks without significantly modifying the transceiver design. The sensing utilizes data channels, such as the Physical Uplink Shared Channel (PUSCH), which carries information on the air interface. We provide the maximum likelihood estimator for the delay and Doppler parameters and derive a lower bound on the Mean Square Error (MSE) for a single target scenario. Link-level simulations show that it is possible to achieve significant throughput while accurately estimating the sensing parameters with PUSCH. Moreover, the results reveal an interesting tradeoff between the number of reference symbols, sensing performance, and throughput in the proposed 5G NR bistatic ISaC system.