Enhanced Wireless Sensing by Exploiting Opportunistic 5G-NR Signals

Wireless sensing through opportunistic signals offers distinct advantages in diverse fields. Compared with 4G long term evolution (LTE), 5G new radio (NR) signal possesses larger bandwidth and more antenna ports, thus is a better candidate for wireless sensing. However, the commercial NR signals have not been widely exploited due to the absence of off-the-shelf modem for channel state information (CSI) extraction and intricate high-layer signaling interaction procedures to obtain the reference signal parameters. For this purpose, we present a channel feature based blind detection method that identifies complete CSI reference signal (CSI-RS) parameters solely from physical layer, which enables opportunistic exploitation of commercial NR signal and full-bandwidth multi-port CSI acquisition. The simulation results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed CSI-RS blind detection method in frequency-selective channel. Furthermore, a prototype system is built to showcase the enhanced sensing ability of commercial NR signal.