Space-Time-Frequency Synthetic Integrated Sensing and Communication Networks

Abstract: Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) promises high spectral and power efficiencies by sharing waveforms, spectrum, and hardware across sensing and data links. Yet commercial cellular networks struggle to deliver fine angular, range, and Doppler resolution due to limited aperture, bandwidth, and coherent observation time. In this paper, we propose a space-time-frequency synthetic ISAC architecture that fuses observations from distributed transmitters and receivers across time intervals and frequency bands. We develop a unified signal model for multistatic and monostatic configurations, derive Cramer-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs) for the estimations of position and velocity. The analysis shows how spatial diversity, multiband operation, and observation scheduling impact the Fisher information. We also compare the estimation performance between a concentrated maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) and a two stage information fusion (TSIF) method that first estimates per-path delay and radial speed and then fuses them by solving a weighted nonlinear least-squares problem via the Gauss-Newton algorithm. Numerical results show that MLE approaches the CRLB in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, while the two stage method remains competitive at moderate to high SNR but degrades at low SNR. A central finding is that fully synthesized network processing is essential, as estimations by individual base stations (BSs) followed by fusion are consistently inferior and unstable at low SNR. This framework offers a practical guidance for upgrading existing communication infrastructure into dense sensing networks.