LO-Free Joint Communication and Sensing via Inter-Antenna Cross-Correlation and Graph-Based Spatial Phase Inference

Abstract

Joint communication and sensing (JCAS) typically rely on coherent downconversion to recover the phase relationships required for array processing. Meanwhile, Local Oscillators (LOs) are a major source of cost, power consumption, and implementation complexity in millimeter-wave (mmWave) and sub-THz receivers. Existing LO-free receiver designs are typically based on envelope detection or related non-coherent operations that do not preserve inter-branch phase information, which limits their applicability to JCAS. This work proposes an LO-free JCAS receiver architecture that leverages pairwise inter-branch correlation processing to suppress the common carrier component and to synthesize relative-phase observables across the antenna array, enabling both data communication and Direction-of-Arrival (DoA) estimation. The transmitted symbols are designed to induce distinct phase-difference patterns, such that the resulting correlation phases contain both a data-dependent component and a DoA-dependent component. We formulate recovery as inference over a correlation graph, where branches are nodes and pairwise correlations are edges, and show that the resulting cycle-consistent redundancy enables robust relative-phase recovery under noise and perturbations. We further derive a topology-aware Cram\'er-Rao lower bound for DoA estimation under a locally unwrapped approximation. Numerical results confirm that increasing graph connectivity improves both bit-error rate and DoA accuracy, with sensing performance approaching the derived bound.