Joint sensing and communication under hardware impairments

Wireless networks are currently being redesigned to provide sensing and communication services. In this talk, I provide a vision of the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) network and an an overview of the recent research advances in the area, emphasizing the impact of hardware impairments and potential research directions for overcoming, and even harnessing, challenges posed by non-idealities in actual transceiver implementations. To this aim, I focus first on the problem of joint localization and communication, discussing how signal processing and machine learning techniques can be integrated to provide high accuracy position estimation. I also analyze the impact of non-idealities such as mutual coupling, calibration errors, or antenna antenna element misplacement, and describe potential solutions exploiting learning strategies. Next, I focus on the design of a joint sensing and communication system implementing a monostatic sensing mode, where circuit and signal processing designs have to be jointly considered to mitigate the self-interference between the transmit and receive arrays. Finally, I will describe research opportunities associated with the implementation of cooperative joint localization and communication strategies. In this setting, multi-cell and multi-user cooperation is leveraged for distributed multi-view sensing, where challenges associated with operating with unsynchronized radios must be overcome.