Bi-Static Sensing with 5G NR Physical Uplink Shared Channel Transmission

The sharing of radio resources between communication and sensing applications is expected be one of the key features of future wireless systems. In many cases, the research towards the joint communication and sensing (JCAS) or integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems concentrate on the waveform design. However, transmissions of current wireless systems, such as the 5G, include pilot, or reference signals for synchronization and channel estimation. In this paper, the use of 5G uplink transmissions for target localization in a bi-static setting is studied. The bi-static approach for JCAS enables to realize sensing without need for changes in network architecture or node hardware. The shortcoming in the uplink transmission-based JCAS is the limited transmit power at an user equipment, which results in short sensing ranges, and the dynamic range problem caused by the imbalance in path losses between the transmitter - receiver and transmitter - target - receiver links.