Collaborative Research: U.S.-Ireland R&D Partnership: Integrated Sensing and Telecommunications for Intelligent Connection and Transmission (INSTINCT)

About This Grant

Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) is a transformative technology that unifies sensing and communication functions within a single system, significantly enhancing efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and performance. By sharing key resources such as spectrum, power, and hardware, ISAC not only reduces infrastructure costs but also improves spectrum utilization, minimizes interference, and alleviates congestion in increasingly crowded wireless environments. This integration enables real-time environmental awareness and faster decision-making, which are essential for applications such as autonomous vehicles, smart cities, Internet of Things networks, and industrial automation. Despite its promise, ISAC systems face major challenges due to the dynamic and complex nature of the wireless medium, particularly in multi-user scenarios, and the limitations of Radio-Frequency (RF) circuitry, which impact both sensing accuracy and communication reliability. This project introduces a novel ISAC system, Integrated Sensing and Telecommunications for Intelligent Connection and Transmission (INSTINCT), to address key challenges in joint communication and sensing. It advances multi-dimensional signal processing (MSP) across the delay, Doppler, and wavenumber domains, while ensuring compatibility with standard wireless protocols. A central innovation is the use of wavenumber-delay-Doppler domain signal processing, where range and velocity information naturally reside. INSTINCT further enables continuous-aperture phased multiple-input multiple-output (CAP)-MIMO, a reconfigurable sub-aperture architecture that enables dynamic, simultaneous communication and sensing capabilities. Key research contributions of this project include: (1) Developing reconfigurable RF hardware that seamlessly integrates communication and sensing via spatially adaptive apertures; (2) Creating electromagnetic-informed channel models and optimal signaling strategies tailored for CAP-MIMO systems; (3) Designing multi-dimensional waveforms and analyzing the impact of synchronization errors, RF impairments, and multi-user interference in the wavenumber-delay-Doppler domain; (4) Developing domain-informed progressive neural network architectures for joint beamforming and phase shift design in communication and radar sensing using reconfigurable hardware; (5) Designing a practical dynamic spectrum sharing framework using learning-based spectrum activity sensing for INSTINCT. 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.