A Novel Pilot Allocation Technique for Uplink OFDMA in ISAC Systems

Abstract: In integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems, pilot signals play a crucial role in enhancing sensing performance due to their strong autocorrelation properties and high transmission power. However, conventional interleaved pilots inherently constrain the maximum unambiguous range and reduce the accuracy of channel impulse response (CIR) estimation compared to continuous orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) signals. To address this challenge, we propose a novel overlapped block-pilot structure for uplink OFDMA-based ISAC systems, called phase-shifted ISAC (PS-ISAC) pilot allocation. The proposed method leverages a cyclic prefix (CP)-based phase-shifted pilot design, enabling efficient multi-transmitter pilot separation at the receiver. Simulation results confirm that the proposed scheme enhances CIR separation, reduces computational complexity, and improves mean square error (MSE) performance under practical power constraints. Furthermore, we demonstrate that utilizing continuous pilot resources maximizes the unambiguous range.