Joint Beamforming for Backscatter Integrated Sensing and Communication

Abstract: Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a key technology of next generation wireless communication. Backscatter communication (BackCom) plays an important role for internet of things (IoT). Then the integration of ISAC with BackCom technology enables low-power data transmission while enhancing the system sensing ability, which is expected to provide a potentially revolutionary solution for IoT applications. In this paper, we propose a novel backscatter-ISAC (B-ISAC) system and focus on the joint beamforming design for the system. We formulate the communication and sensing model of the B-ISAC system and derive the metrics of communication and sensing performance respectively, i.e., communication rate and detection probability. We propose a joint beamforming scheme aiming to optimize the communication rate under sensing constraint and power budget. A successive convex approximation (SCA) based algorithm and an iterative algorithm are developed for solving the complicated non-convex optimization problem. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme and associated algorithms. The proposed B-ISAC system has broad application prospect in IoT scenarios.