User Equipment Assisted Localization for 6G Integrated Sensing and Communication

• Published in: IEEE transactions on communications p. 1
• Main Authors: Guo, Xianzhen, Shi, Qin, Zhang, Shuowen, Xing, Chengwen, Liu, Liang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2025
• Subjects: 6G mobile communication; anchor position errors; Cellular networks; data association; Global Positioning System; Integrated sensing and communication; Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC); localization; Location awareness; networked sensing; Propagation delay; Sensors; Synchronization; Uncertainty; Uplink
• ISSN: 0090-6778; 1558-0857
• DOI: 10.1109/TCOMM.2025.3583640

This paper investigates user equipment (UE) assisted device-free networked sensing in the sixth-generation (6G) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where one base station (BS) and multiple UEs, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), serve as anchors to cooperatively localize multiple passive targets based on the range information. Three challenges arise from the above scheme. First, the UEs are not perfectly synchronized with the BSs. Second, the UE (anchor) positions are usually estimated by the Global Positioning System (GPS) and subject to unknown errors. Third, data association is challenging, since it is hard for each anchor to associate each rang estimation to the right target under device-free sensing. We first tackle the above three challenges under a passive UE based sensing mode, where UEs only passively hear the signals over the BS-target-UE paths. A two-phase UE assisted localization protocol is proposed. In Phase I, we design an efficient method to accurately estimate the ranges from the BS to the targets and those from the BS to the targets to the UEs in the presence of synchronization errors between the BS and the UEs. In Phase II, an efficient algorithm is proposed to localize the targets via jointly removing the UEs with quite inaccurate position information from the anchor set and matching the estimated ranges at the BS and the remaining UEs with the targets. Next, we also consider an active UE based sensing mode, where the UEs can actively emit signals to obtain additional range information from them to the targets. We show that this additional range information can be utilized to significantly reduce the complexity of Phase II in the aforementioned two-phase localization protocol. Numerical results show that our proposed UE assisted networked sensing scheme can achieve very high localization accuracy.