Hybrid Mono- and Bi-static OFDM-ISAC via BS-UE Cooperation: Closed-Form CRLB and Coverage Analysis

Abstract: This paper proposes a hybrid mono- and bi-static sensing framework, by leveraging the base station (BS) and user equipment (UE) cooperation in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. This scheme is built on 3GPP-supported sensing modes, and it does not incur any extra spectrum cost or inter-cell coordination. To reveal the fundamental performance limit of the proposed hybrid sensing mode, we derive closed-form Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for sensing target localization and velocity estimation, as functions of target and UE positions. The results reveal that significant performance gains can be achieved over the purely mono- or bi-static sensing, especially when the BS-target-UE form a favorable geometry, which is close to a right triangle. The analytical results are validated by simulations using effective parameter estimation algorithm and weighted mean square error (MSE) fusion method. Based on the derived sensing bound, we further analyze the sensing coverage by varying the UE positions, which shows that sensing coverage first improves then degrades as the BS-UE separation increases. Furthermore, the sensing accuracy for a potential target with best UE selection is derived as a function of the UE density in the network.