Bistatic Passive Sensing via CSI Power

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Authors: Zhongqin Wang, J. Andrew Zhang, Kai Wu, Kuangda Chen, Min Gang Xu, Y. Jay Guo
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Passive object sensing with communication signals is a key enabler of perceptive mobile networks and integrated sensing and communication. In practical bistatic deployments, transmitter-receiver asynchrony and hardware impairments introduce time-varying random phase offsets in Channel State Information (CSI). Together with limited bandwidth and small antenna arrays, these effects degrade sensing accuracy. This work proposes a lightweight bistatic passive tracking and sensing framework that operates in the CSI-power domain. CSI power suppresses these offsets without explicit phase calibration, while preserving target-induced sensing cues. We show that physically admissible constraints in the spatial-frequency domain induced by transmitter-receiver geometry can resolve the mirror ambiguity inherent to real-valued CSI power. Building on these properties, we develop a real-time 3D Fourier-domain processing pipeline that jointly recovers spectral (delay), spatial (angle), and temporal (Doppler) signatures. The resulting features are integrated into an online framework with adaptive motion detection, outlier suppression, and extended Kalman filter tracking with deterministic initialization, followed by position-refined micro-Doppler feature extraction for micro-motion sensing. Extensive experiments, including simulations, a real-world prototype using 3.1 GHz LTE signals, and an open-source gait recognition dataset, demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CSI-power-based framework for bistatic passive tracking and sensing.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Indoor and Outdoor Localization Technologies Sparse and Compressive Sensing Techniques Speech and Audio Processing

Publication details

Journal / source
IEEE Transactions on Communications
Volume
74
Pages
13222–13236
Publication date
1 January 2026