Channel Modeling for Heterogeneous Vehicular ISAC System with Shared Clusters

In this paper, we consider the channel modeling of a heterogeneous vehicular integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where a dual-functional multi-antenna base station (BS) intends to communicate with a multi-antenna vehicular receiver (MR) and sense the surrounding environments simultaneously. The time-varying complex channel impulse responses (CIRs) of the sensing and communication channels are derived, respectively, in which the sensing and communication channels are correlated with shared clusters. The proposed models show great generality for the capability in covering both monostatic and bistatic sensing scenarios, and as well for considering both static clusters/targets and mobile clusters/targets. Important channel statistical characteristics, including time-varying spatial cross-correlation function (CCF) and temporal auto-correlation function (ACF), are derived and analyzed. Numerically results are provided to show the propagation characteristics of the proposed ISAC channel model. Finally, the proposed model is validated via the agreement between theoretical and simulated as well as measurement results.