Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) is a key enabler for B5G/6G systems, offering benefits in hardware efficiency and spectrum reuse. While ISAC has been shown to be theoretically possible, there remains significant gap to bridge in demonstrating its practicality, reliability, and robustness. Therefore, WSL has developed a real-time ISAC prototype with bistatic sensing and over-the-air synchronization. This testbed is built on National Instruments’ mmWave Transceiver System (MTS) and TMYTEK BBox antennas and can be configured for different symbol and pilot patterns to enable multipath parameter estimation of angle-of-departure (AOD), angle-of-arrival (AOA), time-of-arrival (TOA), and Doppler.

In the first use case, the prototype is configured to perform beamsweeping at both the transmitter and(TX) and the receiver (RX), enabling generation of AOD, AOA, and TOA profiles. As shown in the video below, a clear application of this ISAC framework is the tracking of passive targets that are not part of the network. In addition to providing sensing as a service, the sensing outputs can also be utilized for beam alignment and beam management.