Digital-Twin-Enabled Sensing Channel Estimation for 6G Cell-Free ISAC MIMO System
Jiexin Zhang, Shu Xu, Zhiming Zhu, Ruming Yang, Chunguo Li, Yongming Huang, Lüxi Yang
Abstract
This paper concentrates on addressing the challenging problem of sensing channel estimation in cell-free integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system. This challenge arises from the complex mixture of signals from both the direct sensing channel and target reflected sensing channel. To tackle this challenge, we introduce the digital twin (DT), as a powerful tool to exploit and characterize the inherent features of the target sensing channel by sampling data from the real world and interacting with it. To be specific, the DT model, designed as a generative adversarial network (GAN), is trained to be capable of generating the desired results from the coarse observations, where the distribution of the sensing channel in a particular cell-free ISAC system is implicitly learned via the adversarial process. With this basis, we propose a novel digital-twin-enabled channel estimation (DTE-CE) approach to enhance the performance of channel estimation, where the DTE-CE network is meticulously designed by utilizing the virtual channel matrix (VCM) model to facilitate the estimation process. Simulation results show the excellent performance of the proposed approach, as well as the effectiveness of our designed DTE-CE network, in terms of sensing channel estimation with different transmitting power and numbers of targets.