English

Measuring Discrete Sensing Capability for ISAC via Task Mutual Information

Information Theory 2025-04-10 v4 Networking and Internet Architecture Signal Processing math.IT

Abstract

6G technology offers a broader range of possibilities for communication systems to perform ubiquitous sensing tasks, including health monitoring, object recognition, and autonomous driving. Since even minor environmental changes can significantly degrade system performance, and conducting long-term posterior experimental evaluations in all scenarios is often infeasible, it is crucial to perform a priori performance assessments to design robust and reliable systems. In this paper, we consider a discrete ubiquitous sensing system where the sensing target has mm different states WW, which can be characterized by nn-dimensional independent features XnX^n. This model not only provides the possibility of optimizing the sensing systems at a finer granularity and balancing communication and sensing resources, but also provides theoretical explanations for classical intuitive feelings (like more modalities and more accuracy) in wireless sensing. Furthermore, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed channel model through real-case studies, including person identification, displacement detection, direction estimation, and device recognition. The evaluation results indicate a Pearson correlation coefficient exceeding 0.9 between our task mutual information and conventional experimental metrics (e.g., accuracy). The open source address of the code is: https://github.com/zaoanhh/DTMI

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.09497,
  title  = {Measuring Discrete Sensing Capability for ISAC via Task Mutual Information},
  author = {Fei Shang and Haohua Du and Panlong Yang and Xin He and Jingjing Wang and Xiang-Yang Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.09497},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T16:28:28.253Z