Energy Efficient Robust Beamforming for Vehicular ISAC with Imperfect Channel Estimation

Abstract: This paper investigates robust beamforming for system-centric energy efficiency (EE) optimization in the vehicular integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system, where the mobility of vehicles poses significant challenges to channel estimation. To obtain the optimal beamforming under channel uncertainty, we first formulate an optimization problem for maximizing the system EE under bounded channel estimation errors. Next, fractional programming and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) are utilized to relax the rank-1 constraints. We further use Schur complement and S-Procedure to transform Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) and channel estimation error constraints into convex forms, respectively. Based on the Lagrangian dual function and Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions, it is proved that the optimal beamforming solution is rank-1. Finally, we present comprehensive simulation results to demonstrate two key findings: 1) the proposed algorithm exhibits a favorable convergence rate, and 2) the approach effectively mitigates the impact of channel estimation errors.