Millimeter-Wave Gesture Recognition in ISAC: Does Reducing Sensing Airtime Hamper Accuracy?

Most Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) systems require dividing airtime across their two modes. However, the specific impact of this decision on sensing performance remains unclear and underexplored. In this paper, we therefore investigate the impact on a gesture recognition system using a Millimeter-Wave (mmWave) ISAC system. With our dataset of power per beam pair gathered with two mmWave devices performing constant beam sweeps while test subjects performed distinct gestures, we train a gesture classifier using Convolutional Neural Networks. We then subsample these measurements, emulating reduced sensing airtime, showing that a sensing airtime of 25 % only reduces classification accuracy by 0.15 percentage points from full-time sensing. Alongside this high-quality sensing at low airtime, mmWave systems are known to provide extremely high data throughputs, making mmWave ISAC a prime enabler for applications such as truly wireless Extended Reality.