Cooperation-Based Joint Active and Passive Sensing With Asynchronous Transceivers for Perceptive Mobile Networks

Perceptive mobile network (PMN) is an emerging concept for next-generation wireless networks capable of conducting integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). A major challenge for realizing high performance sensing in PMNs is how to deal with spatially separated asynchronous transceivers. Asynchronicity results in timing offsets (TOs) and carrier frequency offsets (CFOs), which further cause ambiguity in ranging and velocity sensing. Most existing algorithms mitigate TOs and CFOs based on the line-of-sight (LOS) propagation path between sensing transceivers. However, LOS paths may not exist in realistic scenarios. In this paper, we propose a cooperation based joint active and passive sensing scheme for the non-LOS (NLOS) scenarios having asynchronous transceivers. This scheme relies on the cross-correlation cooperative sensing (CCCS) algorithm, which regards active sensing as a reference and mitigates TOs and CFOs by correlating active and passive sensing information. Another major challenge for realizing high performance sensing in PMNs is how to realize high accuracy angle-of-arrival (AoA) estimation with low complexity. Correspondingly, we propose a low complexity AoA algorithm based on cooperative sensing, which comprises coarse AoA estimation and fine AoA estimation. Analytical and numerical simulation results verify the performance advantages of the proposed CCCS algorithm and the low complexity AoA estimation algorithm.