Joint scatterer localization and material identification using radio access technology

Cellular network technologies and radar sensing technologies have been developing in parallel for decades. Instead of developing two individual technologies, the 6G cellular network is expected to naturally support both communication and radar functionalities with shared hardware and carrier frequencies. In this regard, radio access technology (RAT)-based scatterer localization system is one of the important aspects of joint communication and sensing system that uses communication signals between transceivers to determine the location of scatterers in and around the propagation paths. In this article, we first identify the challenges of the RAT-based scatterer localization system and then present single- and multiple-bounce reflection loss simulation results for three common building materials in indoor environments. We also propose two novel methods to jointly localize and identify the type of the scatterers in a rich scattering environment.