Optimal Resource Allocation for Joint Sensing and Communication: Multiple Targets and Clutters

Abstract: We study a contactless target probing based on stimulation by a radio frequency (RF) signal. The transmit signal is dispatched from a transmitter equipped with a two-dimensional antenna array. Then, the reflected signal from the targets are received at multiple distributed sensors. The observation at the sensors are amplified and forwarded to the fusion center. Afterwards, the fusion center performs space-time post processing to extract the maximum common information between the received signal and the targets impulse responses. Optimal power allocation at the transmitter and amplification at the sensors is investigated. The sum-power minimization problem turns out to be a non-convex problem. We propose an efficient algorithm to solve this problem iteratively. By exploiting maximum-ratio transmission (MRT), maximum-ratio combining (MRC) of space-time received signal vector is the optimal receiver at sufficiently low signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR). However, zero-forcing (ZF) at the fusion center outperforms MRC at higher SINR demands.