Integrated Sensing and Communication in Coordinated Cellular Networks

Abstract: Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a promising technique to provide sensing services in future wireless networks. Numerous existing works have adopted a monostatic radar architecture to realize ISAC, i.e., employing the same base station (BS) to transmit the ISAC signal and receive the echo. Yet, the concurrent information transmission causes unavoidable self-interference (SI) to the radar echo at the BS. To overcome this difficulty, we propose a coordinated cellular network-supported multistatic radar architecture to implement ISAC, which allows us to spatially separate the ISAC signal transmission and radar echo reception, intrinsically circumventing the problem of SI. To this end, we jointly optimize the transmit and receive beamforming policy to minimize the sensing beam pattern mismatch error subject to ISAC quality-of-service requirements. The resulting non-convex optimization problem is tackled by an alternating optimization-based suboptimal algorithm. Simulation results showed that the proposed scheme outperforms the two baseline schemes adopting conventional designs.