ISAC-Fi: Enabling Full-Fledged Monostatic Sensing Over Wi-Fi Communication

Abstract

Although Wi-Fi communications have been exploited for sensing purpose for over a decade, the bistatic or multistatic nature of Wi-Fi still poses multiple challenges, hampering real-life deployment of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) within the Wi-Fi framework. In this article, we aim to redesign Wi-Fi so that monostatic sensing (mimicking radar) can be achieved over the multistatic communication infrastructure. Specifically, we propose, design, and implement ISAC-Fi as an ISAC-ready Wi-Fi prototype. We first present a novel self-interference cancellation scheme, in order to extract reflected (radio frequency) signals for sensing purpose in the face of transmissions. We then subtly revise the existing Wi-Fi framework so as to seamlessly operate monostatic sensing under the Wi-Fi communication standard. Finally, we offer two ISAC-Fi designs: 1) a Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP)-based design emulates a totally redesigned ISAC-Fi device and 2) another plug-and-play design allows for backward compatibility by attaching an extra module to an arbitrary Wi-Fi device. We perform extensive experiments to validate the efficacy of ISAC-Fi and also to demonstrate its superiority over existing Wi-Fi sensing proposals.