Integrated Sensing and Communication: Joint Pilot and Transmission Design

Abstract: This paper studies a communication-centric integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where a multi-antenna base station (BS) simultaneously performs downlink communication and target detection. A novel target detection and information transmission protocol is proposed, where the BS executes the channel estimation and beamforming successively and meanwhile jointly exploits the pilot sequences in the channel estimation stage and user information in the transmission stage to assist target detection. We investigate the joint design of pilot matrix, training duration, and transmit beamforming to maximize the probability of target detection, subject to the minimum achievable rate required by the user. However, designing the optimal pilot matrix is rather challenging since there is no closed-form expression of the detection probability with respect to the pilot matrix. To tackle this difficulty, we resort to designing the pilot matrix based on the information-theoretic criterion to maximize the mutual information (MI) between the received observations and BS-target channel coefficients for target detection. We first derive the optimal pilot matrix for both channel estimation and target detection, and then propose an unified pilot matrix structure to balance minimizing the channel estimation error (MSE) and maximizing MI. Based on the proposed structure, a low-complexity successive refinement algorithm is proposed. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed pilot matrix structure can well balance the MSE-MI and the Rate-MI tradeoffs, and show the significant region improvement of our proposed design as compared to other benchmark schemes. Furthermore, it is unveiled that as the communication channel is more correlated, the Rate-MI region can be further enlarged.