Interferometry Based Integrated Sensing and Communications with Imperfect Synchronizations

Interferometry is a powerful tool for estimating the incident angle of electromagnetic (EM) waves by calculating the correlation of received signals at different antennas. Motivated by very-long-baseline interfereometry (VLBI) in radio astronomy, an interferometry based sensing scheme is proposed as integrated sensing and communications (ISAC). It reuses the communication signal from base stations (BSs), similarly to passive radars, which improves the sensing precision and spectrum efficiency. Different from the almost-perfect synchronization in VLBI realized by atomic clocks, the synchronization in BSs of cellular commu-nication networks (usually based on GPS signals) could have significant errors. Therefore, algorithms for compensating for synchronization errors in both time and frequency are proposed. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithms can substantially alleviate the synchronization errors.