Joint Data Association, NLOS Mitigation, and Clutter Suppression for Networked Device-Free Sensing in 6G Cellular Network

Recently, there is a growing interest in achieving integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) in the sixth-generation (6G) cellular network. Inspired by the success of cooperative communication in cloud radio access network, this paper considers a networked device-free sensing architecture based on base station (BS) cooperation to transform the cellular network into a huge sensor that can provide ubiquitous sensing services. Under this framework, the BSs first transmit the downlink communication signals to the mobile users and estimate the range information of the targets based on their e-choes. Next, a central processor collects the range information from all the BSs and localizes each target based on its distances to various BSs. To enable this strategy in 6G network, we will perform joint data association, non-line-of-sight (NLOS) mitigation, and clutter suppression, such that the central processor is able to find out the useful range estimations extracted from the line-of-sight (LOS) paths and match them to the right targets for localization. Numerical results show that our interested networked device-free sensing scheme for the 6G network can localize the targets with high accuracy in the challenging multi-path propagation environment.