CRII: CNS: Integrated Sensing and Communication with Optical Wireless: A Retro-reflective Link Design

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Integrated sensing and communication with optical wireless (ISAC-OW) is a potential 6G enabling technology. Leveraging visible light and infrared spectrums, high-precision sensing and positioning, and high-speed mobile communication can be realized in a single system, enabling advanced solutions for future 6G scenarios, such as smart hospitals and industrial automation. The retro-reflective optical uplink is a promising emerging solution to ISAC-OW that offers several favorable features including hassle-free alignment, minimal interference to adjacent links, microwatt power consumption, low hardware complexity, glaring-free and sniff-proof, and enables simultaneous sensing, positioning and communication with a compact-size tag under a single luminaire. However, the potential of retro-reflective link-based ISAC-OW technology is tempered by basic theoretical and technology development challenges that require a cross-disciplinary approach. The project will investigate fundamental design trade-offs in a retro-reflective uplink enabled ISAC-OW system for large-scale networks. The expected project results advance the state-of-the-art of basic theory and practical design strategies for ISAC-OW system. The project provides cross-disciplinary training opportunities for under-represented students spanning communication theory and signal processing, optical wireless system and circuit design, and wireless networking.The proposed research develops a new cross-domain framework for integrated design of efficient and scalable retro-reflective uplink enabled ISAC-OW networks. The project is anchored on four key research goals: 1) Modeling the retro-reflective optical link and investigating the hardware design of light reader and retro-reflective tag to convey as much luminous flux as possible from the emitter to the receiver; 2) Investigation of MAC protocols to fully exploit the physical (PHY) layer capabilities and address concurrent transmission challenges; 3) Development of an efficient and flexible spectrum allocation strategy for joint sensing and communication; and 4) Integrated system modeling and assessment for performance-complexity-energy optimization and testbed-based experimental validation of hardware and protocols. The proposed research features investigation of several key operational requirements, including analytical optical models of ISAC-OW, dynamic hardware reconfigurability and scalability, concurrent transmission mechanism and new spectrum allocation methods for ISAC in different use cases. The proposed research acts as a catalyst for cross-disciplinary design and analysis of emerging ISAC-OW system in industry and academia to meet the connected intelligence and application requirements.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.