Fourth-Order Co-Channel Interference-Aware OFDM-ISAC Sensing in Cluttered Environments

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a sensing-centric receiver for monostatic orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing integrated sensing and communication (OFDM-ISAC) in the simultaneous presence of passive clutter and a non-cooperative co-channel OFDM transmitter. We show that removing the known ISAC symbols maps target and clutter echoes to deterministic delay-Doppler components, while the non-cooperative waveform remains a random, non-Gaussian, generically full-rank residual. Guided by this distinction, we combine moving-target indication for zero-Doppler clutter with a centered diagonal fourth-order statistic for interference identification. To obtain an unbiased fourth-order estimate from phase-aligned proper snapshots, we derive additive and multiplicative finite-sample bias corrections and pair the corrected statistic with a second-order moment to separate interference from Gaussian noise. Fourth order provides identification and presence testing, whereas second order provides the diagonal disturbance-power proxy used for weighting. We further introduce diagonally loaded weights that enforce a range-Doppler aperture-efficiency floor. Simulations show that the interference estimate approaches its theoretical profile as coherent support grows and remains insensitive to deterministic echoes, that the presence test resolves interference well below the level at which weighting matters, and that loaded processing improves target detection while controlling point-spread-function degradation.