Demo: ISAC Real-Time Experimentation Platform

Abstract

Integrated Sensing And Communication (ISAC) is a key enabler for future wireless systems, yet realizing it in practice requires executing tightly coupled communication and sensing pipelines under strict real-time constraints. In particular, maintaining a continuous high-rate communication link while extracting sensing features introduces fundamental challenges in computation partitioning and latency management across hardware platforms. In this demonstration, we present a real-time Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) ISAC system which exposes and addresses these challenges through a cross-layer hardware/software design. Our approach preserves a standard 5G-like communication pipeline and enables sensing by appending bursts of reference signals for beam-sweeping-based channel probing, requiring only minimal modifications to the payload structure. The system partitions the processing across the FPGA logic, an embedded ARM processor, and an external host, enabling synchronous transmission, real-time channel extraction, and continuous sensing without disrupting the communication link. We demonstrate an end-to-end system where Channel State Information (CSI) is extracted on-device and streamed for realtime processing and visualization of micro-Doppler signatures from moving targets.