Li et al.

J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 EURASIP Journal on Wireless

https://doi.org/10.1186/s13638-022-02172-w
Communications and Networking

RESEARCH Open Access

Integrated sensing and communication

in 6G: a prototype of high resolution
multichannel THz sensing on portable device
Oupeng Li1, Jia He1, Kun Zeng1, Ziming Yu1, Xianfeng Du1, Zhi Zhou1* , Yuan Liang1, Guangjian Wang1,
Yan Chen2, Peiying Zhu2, Wen Tong2, David Lister3 and Luke Ibbetson3

*Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract
1
Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd., 6G is believed to go beyond communication and provide integrated sensing and
Chengdu, China computing capabilities for a vision of Connected Intelligence with everything con-
2
Huawei Technologies Canada nected, everything sensed, and everything intelligent. Integrated sensing and commu-
Co., Ltd., Ottawa, Canada
3
Vodafone Group, Newbury, UK nication will play a vital role for the fusion of physical and cyber worlds. The explora-
tion of higher frequency bands, larger bandwidth, and more advanced large antenna
technologies is paving the way towards the goal. In particular, the study of THz opens
the possibility to have high resolution sensing and imaging capability on a communi-
cation mobile device. In this paper, we take a step along this direction and justify such
possibility by building a THz sensing prototype with millimeter level imaging resolution
while considering the physical aperture constraint of typical mobile device.
Keywords: Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC), 6G, THz sensing, THz
imaging, Portable imaging

1 Introduction
Every 10 years, there will be a new generation upgrade of mobile communications. As
we witness the global roll-out of 5G wireless networks in 2020, we are seeing the emerg-
ing of 6G around horizon 2030. However, the major paradigm shifts take two genera-
tions to mature, e.g. from voice to mobile internet, from connected people to connected
everything. 6G is the next-generation mobile communications system, but it will go far
beyond communications. We believe 6G is to open a new era of Connected Intelligence
to meet the human and societal challenges in many fronts. In particular, 6G will serve
as a distributed neural network that provides sensing, communication and computing
capabilities to fuse the physical, cyber, and biological worlds, truly ushering in an era in
which everything will be sensed, connected, and intelligent.
In particular, thanks to the increased number of antennas and wider bandwidth at
higher frequency band (e.g. up to THz), sensing will become a natively supported func-
tion and key enabler in 6G systems. The communications system as a whole can serve
a sensor. It can explore the radio wave transmission, echo, reflection, and scattering to

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 2 of 21

sense and better understand the physical world. The integration of the sensing and com-
munication will enable many new services which the cellular operators can offer such as
better transportation management, better positioning service and public safety. It also
helps improve wireless communication networks (with the help of AI) which will be tai-
lored to the gathered environment information. The integration of sensing and commu-
nication (ISAC) can happen at different levels, from loosely co-located [1, 2] to totally
integrated. The sharing between the two systems can start from spectrum, hardware,
to more advanced signal processing, or even cross-module, cross-layer protocol design,
benefiting each other. The possible applications of ISAC could include but not limited to
serving as assistive technologies for visually impaired people, working for game/motion-
sensors with connection to gaming console, enabling health and well-being support,
driving support with vehicle-to-vehicle sensing and communications, head movement
tracking support on XR devices, and gesture recognition support to control your smart-
phone in a touchless way with sequences of finger movements patterns.
The operating bandwidth for each mobile communication generation follows five
times and more rules as shown in Fig. 1. While low bands remain the most cost-effective
way for wide coverage, the millimeter wave bands become mature in the 5G and 6G due
to new drivers such as sensing. On the other hand, recent development in semiconduc-
tor technology has bridged the “THz band gap”, which is expected to stimulate various
THz sensing applications such as ultra-high resolution imaging and molecular level
spectrogram analysis. The ultra-wide bandwidth in THz will also enable Tbps data rate
transmission especially in short-range communications. And also open new possibili-
ties for high resolution sensing. ISAC system design with THz band has thus become an
attractive research area.
Also, standardization and regulation study of the THz bands are now ongoing [3]. For
a long time, THz spectrum are described as the last virgin land of the radio spectrum.
Only a few scientific and astronomical services are deployed in these frequency bands,
especially the bands above 275 GHz, for the practical technical limitations, in spite
of there are abundant spectrum and supporting a high transmission rate, strong anti-
interference, and are suitable for meeting the Tbps-level communications. However, this
has partially changed with the development of integrated components and circuits, and
the emergence of various services that require ultra-high data rate transmission. At the
World Radiocommunication Conference 2019 (WRC-19), RR No. 5.564A was approved,
and four globally harmonized frequency bands with a total bandwidth of 137 GHz (i.e.
275–296 GHz, 306–313 GHz, 318–333 GHz and 356–450 GHz) are allocated for the

2G: 200KHz

3G: 5MHz

4G: 20MHz

5G: 100MHz

6G: 500MHz~1GHz
Fig. 1 Operating bandwidth increment in each generation

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 3 of 21

implementation of land mobile and fixed service application in the frequency range of
275–450 GHz, on the basis of study outcomes of Agenda Item 1.15 (WRC-19). There-
fore, with the addition of the spectrum allocated at the previous WRCs, there are more
than 230 GHz Mobile Service (MS) spectrum. The allocated mobile frequency bands
with a contiguous bandwidth would be greater than 5 GHz.
With the application of THz ISAC design, it is expected to open many opportunities
in Fig. 2 for brand new services especially on future mobile devices or even wearables.
The purpose of this paper is to take a step forward along the direction of ISAC with THz
band, trying to justify the feasibility of providing high resolution (e.g. millimeter level)
THz sensing capability on portable communication device. In particular, a prototype
is setup for this verification purpose and a solution of virtual aperture is proposed and
implemented to solve the conflicting requirements of large aperture size for high sensing
resolution and compact device size for its mobile device nature.
The contribution of this paper can be summarized as follows:

• In terms of hardware, this paper demonstrated a portable compact THz prototype

with multi-channel integrated transceiver chips and the terahertz communication
and sensing capability for the first time in the industry.
• In terms of sensing, this paper evaluated the performance of two typical waveform:
FMCW and OFDM. What’s more, a noval optimization method based on geometric
interpretation for SIMO sparse imaging to accomplish near-real-time cm-level imag-
ing is presented in this paper.

Fig. 2 THz application in sensing and communication

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 4 of 21

2 ISAC system with THZ band

2.1 Advantageous of THz sensing and potential use cases
With the multi-level vertical cellular network and ubiquitous coverage of cellular sys-
tems, sensing can be used to create a detailed live city map, including buildings, cars
and pedestrians. This type of map could be used for many smart city services such as
virtual city planning with impact studies, on demanding maintenance, traffic control,
etc., and autonomous driving cars as in Fig. 3. On the other hand, ISAC portable devices
enabled by high frequencies will open the door for numerous applications such as aug-
ment human senses. It empowers people to “see” beyond the limits of human eyes with
portable, wearable or implanted devices. It facilitates information collection in darkness,
inside a box, and beneath the skin with high resolution. Remote surgery, detection of
slits on products, and sink leakage detection are prospective scenarios in daily life.
Enabled by ISAC system, we can turn cellular system to a sensor, virtualizing environ-
ment, analyzing materials and monitoring status of the person. It is also feasible to build
a link between physical, biological and cyber world. With sensing capability, surround-
ing information can be built inside cyber space, which in turn improve physical and bio-
logical world.
THz sensing is preferred due to its ultra-bandwidth and small device size. Fur-
thermore, as the molecular vibration characteristics of the terahertz band, unique
spectrogram identification capability is provided [4]. Besides high throughput in com-
munication, THz would facilitate the utility of sensing such as enhanced human senses,
postures recognition and industrial localization.
Figure 4a summarized the first order advantages of THz sensing and Fig. 4b gives the
high level comparison of THz sensing with other types of sensing. LiDAR stands for
Light Detection and Ranging and CT stands for computed tomography. It can be seen
that compared with professional CT and LiDAR equipment, THz sensing has advantage
in portability, safety, and feasibility to integrate with wireless communication. While
compared with centimeter or millimeter wave sensing, THz sensing enjoys clear ben-
efit of much higher resolution and accuracy. Benifit from these advantages, Thz sensing
research has long attracted attention. The THz penetration characteristic was studied

Fig. 3 Sensing for live city map

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 5 of 21

Fig. 4 High level illustration of the features of THz sensing. a Advantages of THz sensing. b High level
comparison of different sensing techniques

in tumor identification [5], which was able to distinguish between normal and tumor
tissues without additional damage as X-rays do. Beside the medical appllication, non-
destructive detection of THz is also promising in quality control and secuirty scanning
[6, 7], With technologies such as virtual aperture and sparse sampling, it is possible to
image a distant object with millimeter accurcy.

2.2 Potential challenges in integrated system design

In some sense, wireless sensing can be interpreted as a communication method which
conveys information embedded in the communication medium by transmitting a wire-
less signal, and then receiving and analyzing its reflections [8]. However, compared with
communication, sensing is a very different function that has different set of metrics to
optimize. Fundamental tradeoffs between communication and sensing in the design and
performance characterizing of an ISAC system have thus attracted research investiga-
tions [9]. It is desirable to characterize such tradeoffs and identify potential challenges to
get better understanding for ISAC system design.

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 6 of 21

In particular, for a THz ISAC system on portable devices, it is expected that the new
sensing applications (such as hidden object imaging) can be performed via THz signals
that are used for ultra-high speed communications (such as for short range communica-
tions). In this case, the major design challenges come from both hardware design and air
interface design.
Firstly, from the aspect of hardware design, there are contradicting requirements for
the two functions [10, 11]. For high resolution sensing application, especially high cross-
range resolution applications, thousands of antenna elements are required to create
large enough aperture for signal detection. However, this is conflicting with the design
requirement of a communication device that has strict constraints on the size and power
consumption for commercialization. To solve this problem, virtual aperture approaches
are applied in our prototype system. In particular, virtual multiple-input multiple-output
(MIMO) design in the hardware transceiver architecture and sparse sampling design in
the scanning process are proposed and combined.
From the aspect of the air interface design for an ISAC system, on the other than, sub-
stantial works have been done on joint waveform design [12]. The main challenge comes
from the contradicting key performance indicators (KPIs) in the design, i.e. spectral effi-
ciency for communication, and resolution and accuracy for sensing. The jointly designed
waveform enables a signal to support both functions [13]. As a first step, in our proto-
type design, communication oriented waveform (such as rrthogonal frequency division
multiplexing (OFDM)-based waveform) is evaluated and compared with sensing ori-
ented waveform (such as linear frequency modulation (LFM)-based waveform) in terms
of range and cross-range accuracy. State of the art study suggests that there is still room
for joint waveform design to achieve the best tradeoff between communication capacity
and sensing accuracy [12], which will be our next step investigation work.

3 Prototype design for high resolution THZ imaging on portable devices

As aforementioned, the biggest challenge on the hardware design comes from the fact
that to support a high-precision sensing resolution, especially in the cross-range domain,
a large enough aperture (up to thousands of antenna elements) is required. Given the
size and power constraint of a portable device, however, it is clear that physically pack-
ing thousands of antenna elements is infeasible.
Therefore, to implement an ISAC system with a simple hardware architecture, i.e.
limited number of antenna elements in a practical size with low cost and low power
consumption, a solution of virtual aperture with MIMO structure and sparse scanning
approach is proposed in this paper.
The virtual aperture is constructed in two steps. In the first step, MIMO structure is
implemented in the hardware architecture to form a virtual aperture larger than the
physical aperture constructed by the antenna elements, as elaborated; in the second step,
a sparse scanning approach is applied, transforming the degree-of-freedom in time and
space into larger virtual aperture.

3.1 Hardware architecture
To implement the solution of virtual aperture, the hardware architecture of the proposed
ISAC system needs to support the following requirements:

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 7 of 21

(1) Multiple transciever (TRX) chains to support MIMO structure as the first step for
the overall virtual aperture.
(2) Wide antenna pattern to cover the target scanning area to maintain the correlation
among the reflected samplings.
(3) Real-time position information (cm-level from MEMS) of the device to perform
coherent process of the received signals.

The schematic of the prototype architecture is shown in Fig. 5. The prototype is built
to work at 140 GHz carrier frequency with 8 GHz bandwidth. The transmitter antenna
array has 4 RF ports while the receiver antenna array has 16 radio frequency (RF) ports,
forming a 4T16R MIMO structure. When the transmitter transmits mutually orthogo-
nal signals from 4 transmit antennas, these waveforms can be extracted from each of
the 16 receive antennas by a set of matched filters, equivalently forming a virtual array
with 64 antenna elements. As mentioned earlier, this is the first step to construct the
virtual aperture. An even larger scale virtual array can be equivalently achieved by sparse
scanning that will be elaborated in the next subsection, forming a final virtual aperture
equivalent to that with thousands of antenna elements. The local oscillator signal is

Fig. 5 Illustration of the architecture of ISAC prototype

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 8 of 21

provided by a phase-locked loop (PLL) controlled by the baseband. The micro-electro-

mechanical system (MEMS) gyroscope is used to record the trajectory and posture of
the sensing device.
Figure 6 shows the 3 dimensional (3D) model of the Terahertz frond end. The wave-
guide antenna is fabricated in three part. The transceiver chips are mounted on the sub-
strate unit together with the h-plane probe which converts the signal form micro-strip
line to waveguide. The radiation unit is an array of horn antenna, where the antenna
elements are sparsely placed with a spacing of 2.14 mm, which is equivalent to the wave-
length at 140 GHz.
The antenna radiation unit is a wide beam design with a 3 dB lobe width of 50◦ , which
can cover about 0.9 × 0.9 m2 at a distance of one meter. The 3D antenna pattern and gain
pattern at phi = 90◦ are given in Fig. 7. The antenna gain is about 7dBi.
The output power of the transmitter chip is 10 dBm and the receiver noise figure is
about 10 dB. Considering about 2 dB transmission loss, the system output effective
isotropic radiated power (EIRP) is around 15 dBm. Under such specifications, within
5m distance, a THz ISAC system could support 16 quadrature amplitude modulation
(QAM) transmission for communication and at the same time achieve mm-level resolu-
tion for sensing and imaging. If only imaging is performed, the maximum imaging dis-
tance can be longer. The main reason is that the signal-to-noise ratio can be improved by
coherent accumulation during imaging.

3.2 Imaging approach with sparse sampling

In this subsection, we first discuss the implementation issues and challenges in imaging
under the hardware architecture and then propose our design considerations and related
imaging approach.
The first challenge we encountered is that the number of antennas used for joint com-
munication and sensing on portable devices is limited. For example, there are only 4
transmit antennas and 16 receive antennas for the antenna array. Furthermore, in order
to avoid the strong side-lobe interference, the spacing between these antennas should
be kept about half a wavelength apart. This will constraint the aperture size of the array

Fig. 6 The 3D structure of microstrip to waveguide transition probe and circular polarization waveguide
antenna

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 9 of 21

Fig. 7 The 3D radiation pattern and antenna gain pattern at phi = 90◦

aperture. However, from the perspective of the imaging performance, the higher resolu-
tion requires sufficient large aperture size of the antenna.
To solve this, we propose to use a sparse scanning approach to form even larger virtual
aperture, which has been widely used in the field of remote sensing and monitoring in
satellite-air-based platforms [14]. With this technique, the echo signals are collected at
different times and different spatial locations with the moving of the imaging platform,
and then they are combined in well-order into a virtual aperture that is much larger than
the physical antenna size, thus achieving a better resolution.
One challenge brought by the virtual aperture imaging is that when a customer holds
the device to perform imaging on an object, the scanning trajectory is irregular [15]. As
a result, the collected echo signals is sparse. For example, the customer holds a smart-
phone mounted with imaging module to image an object with Z-shaped scanning trajec-
tory, as shown in Fig. 8.
It can be found that the echo samplings in the horizontal direction are continuous,
i.e., the spatial spacing between sampling points is comparable to the wavelength of the
echo signal. However, this feature cannot be maintained in the vertical direction, since
it is difficult for an untrained customer to keep the spacing between two adjacent lines
of the scanning track in wavelength order. Therefore, the echo samplings in the vertical
direction are sparse, which will cause strong side-lobe interference, and then result in
artifacts. In serious cases, the target can’t even be imaged.
To solve this challenge, we consider decomposing the scanning trajectory on a two
dimensional (2D) plane into several sets of linear scanning tracks along the horizontal

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 10 of 21

Fig. 8 Illustration of the irregular scanning trajectory of portable devices

Fig. 9 Illustration of the sparse scanning approach and the tomographic imaging techniques

direction, where the sparseness of the sampling signals in the vertical domain is then
equivalent to the sparseness between horizontal tracks, as illustrated in Fig. 9. In this
case, the reflected information from the object can be retrieved from these vertically
sparse samplings via compressed sensing techniques. After that, by using the concept
of tomographic imaging, the echoed samplings obtained from each horizontal linear
scanning track are imaged, and combined to form the final 3D image. Examples with
different levels of vertical sparsity are shown.

3.3 Waveform evaluation
RF imaging has many different characteristics from optical image, making it compli-
cated to assess the quality with unified metrics [16]. Also, the metrics to evaluate the
selection of waveform for RF imaging are very different from that for communica-
tions where block error rate (BLER), throughput, and peak-to-average power ratio
(PAPR) are the key performance indicators. Instead, for the performance evaluation
of RF imaging at THz band, sensing accuracy and resolution are usually considered as
key performance indicators. Furthermore, ambiguity functions (AF) and point spread
functions (PSF) are treated as important metrics for waveform evaluation as well [16].

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 11 of 21

In the simulation for waveform evaluation, we consider an ISAC system at a portable

device with a total bandwidth of 8 GHz operating at the carrier frequency of 140 GHz.
Moreover, it is assumed that the portable device is equipped with one mono-static full
duplex sensing antenna transmitting joint ISAC signal to a target nearby. For simplic-
ity, we assume a point target with single line-of-sight channel [17]. And an ideal scan-
ning trajectory with half wavelength spacing in both horizontal and vertical directions
are applied in the simulation (i.e. no sparsity). Also we add an interference of 80 dB at
the receiver to emulate the impact of full duplex working mode for both OFDM and
frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) waveforms. Phase noise is ignored due
to small SNR degradation for mono-static sensing [18]. Other simulation configurations
are listed in Table 1.
The PSF for both the range and cross-range are simulated to calculate the peak side-
lobe ratio (PSLR) and integrated side-lobe ratio (ISLR) [19] for comparison. Figure 10
shows the results of the range and cross-range point spread function (PSF) for both
OFDM and FMCW waveforms. The comparison of resolutions is further summarized
in Table 2.
The simulation results show that FMCW and OFDM have similar cross-range per-
formance. Though OFDM has slightly better range ISLR, it has worse range resolution.
Considering that various performance requirements of sensing applications, we hope
that the above simulations can help to select alternative waveforms for THz imaging
applications. For long range communication in the uplink, OFDM is not favorable due to
its high PAPR, but for THz imaging applications on portable devices, where the typical
sensing range is within tens of meters, both of these two waveforms could be considered
as potential candidates.

4 Implementation
The prototype is tested with a robotic arm imitating trajectory of human hand. A metal
lemon core in Fig. 11a, with a diameter of 8 cm, is placed on top of the 4 cm tall foam
and is 50 cm from the sensing device for better demonstation. Even though we use only
metal target here, target of diferent kinds of materials can also be used for imaging.
Besides, the absorbing material is placed beneath the foam.

Table 1 Simulation configurations

Parameter OFDM FMCW

Carrier frequency (GHz) 140 140

Bandwidth (GHz) 8 8
Frequency sampling (GHz) 9.8304 0.0128
Distance (m) 1 1
Virtual array 128*128 128*128
SNR (dB) − 21.4 − 21.4
Target RCS (m 2) 0.01 0.01
CP (ns) 59 –
FFT size 8192 1024
Tp (us) – 50

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 12 of 21

Fig. 10 Comparison of FMCW and OFDM waveforms. a Range PSF. b Cross-range PSF

Table 2 Waveform simulation results

Waveform PSLR (dB) ISLR (dB) Resolution (m)
Range Cross-range Range Cross-range Range Cross-range

FMCW − 13.6 − 13.8 − 10.5 − 10.3 0.012 0.008

OFDM − 13.66 − 13.75 − 11.0 − 10.2 0.015 0.008

As depicted in Fig. 11b, the robotic arm scans at a speed of 1 m/s with the scanning
area set as 10 cm by 12 cm in the prototype. The longitudinal spacing of the scan
trajectories are controlled to simulate the sparsity in the trajectories of the user’s
hand-held scan behavior. The spatial position information from the robotic arm and

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 13 of 21

Fig. 11 Implementation setup. a A metal lemon core for image. b Measurement setup for THz sensing on
portable devices

the MEMS are feedback simultaneously, and synchronized with the received echo
signals. Here, the position information from robot arm is used to correct the infor-
mation from the MEMS. In this paper, the scanning path in the test apply the regular
scanning as shown in Fig. 11, which takes about 40 s. The position returned by the
MEMS will then be used for sparse free hand scanning imaging enhanced by the
4T16R to reduce the scan path, which would achieve less than 10 s scanning time.

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 14 of 21

5 Methods
The single-input single-output (SISO) imaging method used in this paper is the tra-
ditional methods including backprojection algorithm [20] and tomography algorithm
[21]. This paper mainly focuses on the single-input multiple-output (SIMO) imaging
method.
Multiple receivers can greatly reduce the imaging time and improve the imaging
quality compared with one receiver. Theoretically, n receivers can reduce the sam-
pling time to 1/n compared with one receiver under the same imaging quality. Less
sampling time will reduces the difficulty of motion error compensation, which will
improve the imaging quality in return. However, the gains and time delays of different
receiver channels are difficult to be consistent due to factors such as RX channel hard-
ware, antenna position, platform attitude and equipment noise. Multichannel ampli-
tude and phase imbalance leads to azimuth ghosting, which will significantly affect
the imaging quality. Since the amplitude error can be easily compensated by multi-
channel amplitude equalization methods [22, 23], this paper mainly focus on back
projection algorithm with a noval multichannel phase error compensation method.
The whole multichannel imaging process based on back projection algorithm can be
viewed as time-domain coherent integration of electromagnetic signals from multiple
receivers. Let the vector bk denote the filtered backprojection of pulse k over all pixels
of interest. The nth channel (vectorized) image is computed as

zn = bk .
(1)
k

When the single-channel image are subject to phase errors, the objective of the multi-
channel phase compensation algorithm is to produce phase estimates θ̂ = {θ̂1 , θ̂2 . . . , θ̂N }
such that the multichannel image quality of

z= z n e−jθ̂n . (2)
n

is maximized over a given metric. As motivated by image sharpness maximization crite-

rion, we consider the sharpness metric s(θ̂ ) = i vi2, where vi is the magnitude of the ith
pixel. Therefore, the optimal correction is

θ̂ = arg max s(θ). (3)

θ

Since the optimization in (3) has no closed-form solution, this paper resort to an (N − 1)
step method. We set the 1st channel as the reference channel, then the phase estimates
can be simplified as θ̂ = {0, θ̂1 . . . , θ̂N −1 }. Let θˆi denote the ith channel phase correction
of the ith step; then, the phase error estimation at the next step i + 1 is defined as

θ̂i+1 = arg max s(0, θ̂1 , . . . , θ̂i , θ ) (4)

θ

When holding the previous channels’ phases constant, the reflectivity image z(φ) at ith
step can be defined as

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 15 of 21

i

z(θ) = e−jθ̂i−1 b̂p + e−jθ b̂i (5)
i=1

= x + e−jθ y (6)

where x comprises the backprojection sum of all pulses from 1 ∼ i − 1 channel except
for pulses from ith channel and y is the uncorrected phase of ith channel. The associated
intensity of the mth pixel of z(θ) is
∗
vm = zm zm = (xm + e−jθ ym )(xm
∗
+ ejθ y∗m ) (7)

= |xm |2 + |ym |2 + 2ℜ(ejθ y∗m ) (8)

As we can see, (v 0 )m = |xm |2 + |ym |2 is constant and (v θ )m = 2ℜ(ejθ y∗m ) depends on the
unknown phase of the pulses from ith channel. The sharpness of the image is

2
vm = �v�2 (9)
m

Therefore, the optimal phase correction for the pulses from ith channel is the value of θ
that maximizes the squared length of v.
If we define the vectors p and q with elements pm = 2ℜ(y∗m xm ejθ ) and bm = −2ℑ(y∗m xm ),
v θ may be written as

v θ = pcosθ + qsinθ. (10)

which is an interpretation of an ellipse in in a geometric sense. The displacement vec-

torv0 can be decomposed into a portion in the p and q . In this paper, we choose an
orthonormalization of p, q to represent the basis {s1 , s2 } for convenience

p q − s1 s1 T q
s1 = s2 =  
q − s1 s1 T q  (11)
�p�

We got a new coordinate system

   
p̂ q̂
p̂ ≡ 1 = S T p q̂ ≡ 1 = S T q (12)
p̂2 q̂2

where S = [s1 s2] . After projected onto the new coordinate system, the point becomes

x0 = E T (EE T )(−v0 ) = −E T v0 . (13)

Finally, the optimization problem is transformed into a geometry problem. We has to

find the point x̂ on the ellipse lying farthest form the given point x0. The unclosed form
solution problem for the optimal phase correction becomes a closed-form solution
problem after the geometry interpretation. The solution method is similar to [24]. If x̂ is
the farthest point, the vector x0 − x̂ will be parallel to the normal e(x) of the ellipse

x0 − x̂ = βe(x̂) (14)

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 16 of 21

where β is a real constant. The ellipse may be written x(θ) = [x1 x2 ]T = p̂cosθ + q̂sinθ
or implicitly

f (x) = xT Ox = 1 (15)

with
 
o1 o3
O=
o3 o2 (16)

where

o1 = (p̂22 + q̂22 )/r (17)

o2 = (p̂12 + q̂12 )/r (18)

o3 = −(p̂1 p̂1 + q̂1 q̂2 )/r (19)

r = (p̂2 q̂1 − p̂1 q̂2 )2 (20)

Hence, the normal e(x) may be computed by gradient for f (x)

e(x) ≡ ▽f ((x)) = 2Ox. (21)

The x̂ can be written as

x̂ = (βO + I)V T (22)

The eigendecomposition of O is

O = V V T . (23)

Substituting Eqs. (23) and (22) into (15), we can obtain

1 = x0 (βO + I)O(βO + I)−1 x0 (24)

= xT0 V (β + I)−1 (β + I)−1 T x0 (25)

1
 
(β1 +1)2
0
= xT0 V 2 V T x0 (26)
0 (β2 +1)2

where 1 and 2 represent the eigenvalues of O.

Letting [γ1 γ2 ]T = V T x0 , the Eq. (26) becomes

1 2
γ12 2
+ γ22 − 1 = 0. (27)
(β1 + 1) (β2 + 1)2

The Eq. (27) has the same roots as

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 17 of 21

4

δi β i = 0 (28)
i

where

δ0 = 1 γ12 + 2 γ22 − 1 (29)

δ1 = 21 (2 γ22 − 1) + 22 (1 γ12 − 1) (30)

δ2 = (1 γ12 − 1)22 + (2 γ22 − 1)21 − 41 2 (31)

δ3 = −21 2 (1 + 2 ) (32)

δ4 = −(1 2 )2 . (33)

There are up to four real roots in Eq. (28). The smallest real root represents the farthest
point on the ellipse [24]. Let β̂ denote the smallest real root of Eq. (28); then we have
 
cosβ̂
= [p̂ q̂]−1 (β̂O + I)−1 x0 . (34)
sinβ̂

The optimal phase correction β̂ may be written as

 
−1 sinβ̂
β̂ = tan (35)
cosβ̂

6 Result and discussion

6.1 SISO imaging
Based on the testbed setup shown in Fig. 11, the proof-of-concept THz imaging perfor-
mance with different sparsity configurations in the scanning patterns are presented and
compared through Figs. 12, 13 and 14 below.

Fig. 12 The imaging results of non-sparse full aperture scanning. a Three-dimentional image. b Cross-range
profile (Top-down view)

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 18 of 21

Fig. 13 The imaging results of sparse scanning with 50% sparsity. a Three-dimentional image. b Cross-range
profile (Top-down view)

Fig. 14 The imaging results of sparse apeture scanning with 75% sparsity. Left: three-dimentional image;
Right: cross-range profile (Top-down view). a Imaging with traditional tomography approach [25]. b Imaging
with compressive sensing based tomography approach

Firstly, in Fig. 12, non-sparse full aperture scanning is assumed, in which the vertical
sampling is non-sparse, thus achieving the best PSLR and ISLR. This mode is set up as
an upper bound performance reference. Then, in order to simulate the sparsity in free
hand scanning to further reduce the scan time, we assume various sparsity in test. Meas-
urements with sparse scanning, in which the sampling in vertical is sparse, are evaluated
and presented in Figs. 13 and 14 for 50% and 75% sparsity, respectively. Here 50% and

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 19 of 21

75% sparsity mean that there are 50% and 25% non-zero samplings in the vertical direc-
tion, respectively. These modes are set up to simulate the behavior of scanning with a
handheld device in real world case. Note that the higher the sparsity, the less the col-
lected sampling and thus the stronger the side-lobe interference occurred at the resulted
aperture, representing a worse scanning condition.
From these measured results above, it can be concluded that the objects can be well
imaged (i.e. the outline of the metal lemon core can be clearly outlined) with limited
loss even with 75% sparsity if advanced algorithms are applied. This implies that the mil-
limeter-level resolution of image can be achieved by the prototype THz ISAC system.
Furthermore, it is also observed that, more artifacts occur in the image as the sparsity of
the scanning trajectory increases. This phenomenon is due to the side-lobe interference
of irregular echo sampling mentioned. Such interference would cause destructive impact
if no advanced signal processing algorithm is applied.

6.2 SIMO imaging
SIMO imaging results based on backprojection without phase error compensation
Fig. 15a, with salient point method Fig. 15b and with the geometric interpretation algo-
rithm Fig. 15c are shown in Fig. 15.

Fig. 15 SIMO imaging results. a Backprojection without phase error compensation. b Backprojection with
salient point method. c Backprojection with the geometric interpretation algorithm

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 20 of 21

In SIMO imaging scenerio, the scan time can be reduced to 1/n theoretically with n
receive channels compared with the scan time of SISO imaging. In our experiment, the
SIMO imaging scan time is 10.2 s. Data processing can be performed simultaneously
with imaging scans. The whole time from data acquisition to imaging results is 12.4 s.
The experiments are conducted on a laptop computer with i7-8550U (1.8 GHz) and 16
GB memory. We can greatly shorten the time with MIMO down to less than 2 s within
the next 6 months. We believe the near-real-time applications can be implemented.
As a summary, we can conclude that with the proposed virtual aperture solution and
advanced signal processing algorithms, mm-level imaging resolution is achievable on a
portable device working in hand-held scanning mode.

7 Conclusion
In this paper, we discussed the advantages and application scenarios of THz sensing and
in particular, we demonstrated with a THz prototype that by applying the proposed vir-
tual aperture solution, THz sensing on a portable device can achieve millimeter level
sensing accuracy. The proposed virtual aperture solution has been implemented at 140
GHz with 8 GHz bandwidth and a 4T16R MIMO structure in the hardware architecture
and a sparse scanning approach that exploited time and spatial degree-of-freedom to
further extend the size of the virtual aperture. Different waveforms and different levels of
sparsity have been evaluated and compared, verifying the feasibility of using THz com-
munication signals to achieve mm-level sensing resolution.

Abbreviations
THz Terahertz
ISAC Integrated sensing and communication
AI Artificial intelligence
WRC​ World radiocommunication conference
MS Mobile service
LIDAR Light detection and ranging
CT Computed tomography
MIMO Multiple-input multiple-output
KPI Key performance indicator
OFDM Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing
LFM Linear frequency modulation
RF Radio frequency
PLL Phase-locked loop
MEMS Micro-electro-mechanical systems
EIRP Equivalent isotropically radiated power
QAM Quadrature amplitude modulation
2D Two dimensional
3D Three dimensional
BLR Block error rate
PAPR Peak-to-average power rate
AF Ambiguity functions
PSF Point spread functions
FMCW Frequency modulated continuous wave
SNR Signal-to-noise ratio
PSLR Peak side-lobe ratio
ISLR Integrated side-lobe ratio
SISO Single-input single-output
SIMO Single-input multiple-output

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions that helped to
improve the quality of this manuscript.

Author Contributions
All authors have contributed equally. All authors have read and approved the manuscript.

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Li et al. J Wireless Com Network (2022) 2022:106 Page 21 of 21

Availability of data and materials

Not available on line. Please contact the author for data requests.

Declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Received: 18 October 2021 Accepted: 1 September 2022

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