A General Sensing-assisted Channel Estimation Framework in Distributed MIMO Network

Joint sensing and communication (JSC) research direction has been envisioned to be a key technology in 6G communications, which has the potential to equip the traditional base station with sensing capability by fully exploiting the existing wireless communication infrastructures. To further enhance wireless communication performance in JSC, sensing-assisted communication has attracted attention from both industry and academia. However, most existing papers focused on sensing-assisted communication under line-of-sight (LoS) scenarios due to sensing limitations, where the sensing target and communication user remain the same. In this paper, we propose a general sensing-assisted channel estimation framework, where the channel estimation accuracy for both Los and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) are considered. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposed sensing-assisted communication framework achieves higher channel estimation accuracy and throughput compared to the traditional least-square (LS) estimation. More importantly, the feasibility of the proposed framework has been validated to solve the complex channel estimation challenge in distributed multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) network.