Integrated Sensing and Communication in the Finite Blocklength Regime

TL;DR

This paper develops theoretical bounds and characterizes the performance limits of an integrated sensing and communication system operating in the finite blocklength regime, demonstrating significant improvements over traditional schemes.

Contribution

It provides the first finite blocklength bounds and second-order rate-distortion-error region for integrated sensing and communication systems.

Findings

Joint ISAC scheme outperforms time-sharing schemes.

Derived achievability and converse bounds for finite blocklength.

Characterized second-order rate-distortion-error region.

Abstract

A point-to-point integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system is considered where a transmitter conveys a message to a receiver over a discrete memoryless channel (DMC) and simultaneously estimates the state of the channel through the backscattered signals of the emitted waveform. We derive achievability and converse bounds on the rate-distortion-error tradeoff in the finite blocklength regime, and also characterize the second-order rate-distortion-error region for the proposed setup. Numerical analysis shows that our proposed joint ISAC scheme significantly outperforms traditional time-sharing based schemes where the available resources are split between the sensing and communication tasks.