This paper studies a challenging scenario in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system where the locations of the sensing target and the communication user are both unknown and random, while only their probability distribution information is known. In this case, how to fully utilize the spatial resources by designing the transmit beamforming such that both sensing and communication can achieve satisfactory performance statistically is a difficult problem, which motivates the study in this paper. Moreover, we aim to reveal if it is desirable to have similar probability distributions for the target and user locations in terms of the ISAC performance. Firstly, based on only probability distribution information, we establish communication and sensing performance metrics via deriving the expected rate or posterior Cramér-Rao bound (PCRB). Then, we formulate the transmit beamforming optimization problem to minimize the PCRB subject to the expected rate constraint, for which the optimal solution is derived. It is unveiled that the rank of the optimal transmit covariance matrix is upper bounded by the summation of MIMO communication channel matrices for all possible user locations. Furthermore, due to the need to cater to multiple target/user locations, we investigate whether dynamically employing different beamforming designs over different time slots improves the performance. It is proven that using a static beamforming strategy is sufficient for achieving the optimal performance. Numerical results validate our analysis, show that ISAC performance improves as the target/user location distributions become similar, and provide useful insights on the BS-user/-target association strategy.
In this paper, an IRS-aided integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system operating in the terahertz (THz) band is proposed to maximize the system capacity. Transmit beamforming and phase-shift design are transformed into a universal optimization problem with ergodic constraints. Then the joint optimization of transmit beamforming and phase-shift design is achieved by gradient-based, primal-dual proximal policy optimization (PPO) in the multi-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) scenario. Specifically, the actor part generates continuous transmit beamforming and the critic part takes…
This paper explores the potential of the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in realizing multi-user concurrent communication and localization, using the same time-frequency resources. Specifically, we propose an IRS-enabled multi-user integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework, where a distributed semi-passive IRS assists the uplink data transmission from multiple users to the base station (BS) and conducts multi-user localization, simultaneously. We first design an ISAC transmission protocol, where the whole transmission period consists of two periods, i.e., the ISAC period for s…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has shown its effectiveness in facilitating orthogonal time-division integrated sensing and communications (TD-ISAC), in which the sensing task and the communication task occupy orthogonal time-frequency resources, while the role of IRS in the more interesting scenarios of non-orthogonal ISAC (NO-ISAC) systems has so far remained unclear. In this paper, we consider an IRS-aided NO-ISAC system, where a distributed IRS is deployed to assist concurrent communication and location sensing for a blind-zone user, occupying non-orthogonal/overlapped time-frequency …
Beamforming design has been widely investigated for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems with full-duplex (FD) sensing and half-duplex (HD) communication. To achieve higher spectral efficiency, in this paper, we extend existing ISAC beamforming design by considering the FD capability for both radar and communication. Specifically, we consider an ISAC system, where the base station (BS) performs target detection and communicates with multiple downlink users and uplink users reusing the same time and frequency resources. We jointly optimize the downlink dual-functional transmit si…
We consider transmit beamforming and reflection pattern design in reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems to jointly precode communication symbols and radar waveforms. We treat two settings of multiple users and targets. In the first, we use a single RIS to enhance the communication performance of the ISAC system and design beams with good cross-correlation properties to match a desired beam pattern while guaranteeing a desired signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) for each user. In the second setting, we use two dedicated …
In this paper, we establish an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system based on a distributed semi-passive intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), which allows location sensing and data transmission to be carried out simultaneously, sharing the same frequency and time resources. The detailed working process of the proposed IRS-based ISAC system is designed, including the transmission protocol, location sensing and beamforming optimization. Specifically, each coherence block consists of two periods, the ISAC period with two time blocks and the pure communication (PC) period. During eac…
The implementation of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) highly depends on the effective beamforming design exploiting accurate instantaneous channel state information (ICSI). However, channel tracking in ISAC requires large amount of training overhead and prohibitively large computational complexity. To address this problem, in this paper, we focus on ISAC-assisted vehicular networks and exploit a deep learning approach to implicitly learn the features of historical channels and directly predict the beamforming matrix for the next time slot to maximize the average achievable sum-rate…
In this paper, we consider a hybrid reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) comprising of active and passive elements to aid an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system serving multiple users and targets. Active elements in a hybrid RIS include amplifiers and phase shifters, whereas passive elements include only phase shifters. We jointly design transmit beamformers and RIS coefficients, i.e., amplifier gains and phase shifts, to maximize the worst-case target illumination power while ensuring a desired signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio for communication links and constraining…
This paper studies the multi-antenna multicast channel with integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), in which a multi-antenna base station (BS) sends common messages to a set of single-antenna communication users (CUs) and simultaneously estimates the parameters of an extended target via radar sensing. We investigate the fundamental performance limits of this ISAC system, in terms of the achievable rate for communication and the estimation Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for sensing. First, we derive the optimal transmit covariance in semi-closed form to balance the CRB-rate (C-R) tradeoff, and acc…
Ray Antenna Array Enhanced Low-Altitude ISAC: Performance Analysis and Beamforming Design
The Sixty-third Research Institute, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学第六十三研究所）；National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University（东南大学移动通信国家重点实验室）；Purple Mountain Laboratories（紫金山实验室）
Predictive beamforming design is an essential task in realizing high-mobility integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), which highly depends on the accuracy of the channel prediction (CP), i.e., predicting the angular parameters of users. However, the performance of CP highly depends on the estimated historical channel stated information (CSI) with estimation errors, resulting in the performance degradation for most traditional CP methods. To further improve the prediction accuracy, in this paper, we focus on the ISAC in vehicle networks and propose a convolutional long-short term (CLSTM) r…
Joint Active and Passive Beamforming with Sensing-Assisted Discrete Phase Shifts for Dual-RIS ISAC Systems
Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications（重庆邮电大学）；National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, Southeast University（东南大学移动通信国家重点实验室）；University of Macau（澳门大学）
Communication and sensing are two important features of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs). In traditional vehicle-mounted devices, communication and sensing modules exist but in an isolated way, resulting in a waste of hardware resources and wireless spectrum. In this paper, to cope with the above inefficiency, we propose a vehicular behavior-aware integrated sensing and communication (VBA-ISAC) beamforming design for the vehicle-mounted transmitter with multiple antennas. In this work, beams are steered based on vehicular behaviors to assist driving and meanwhile provide spectral-effic…
