Radio-based Sensing and Indoor Mapping with Millimeter-Wave 5G NR Signals

The emerging 5G New Radio (NR) networks are expected to enable huge improvements, e.g., in terms of capacity, number of connected devices, peak data rates and latency, compared to existing networks. At the same time, a new trend referred to as the RF convergence is aiming to jointly integrate communications and sensing functionalities into the same systems and hardware platforms. In this paper, we investigate the sensing prospects of 5G NR systems, with particular emphasis on the user equipment side and their potential for joint communications and environment mapping. To this end, a radio-based sensing approach utilizing the 5G NR uplink transmit signal and an efficient receiver processing and mapping scheme are proposed. An indoor scenario is then studied and evaluated through real-world RF measurements at 28 GHz mm-wave band, showing that impressive mapping performance can be achieved by the proposed system. The measurement data is available at a permanent open repository.