Precoding for Multi-Cell ISAC: from Coordinated Beamforming to Coordinated Multipoint and Bi-Static Sensing

TL;DR

This paper develops robust precoding strategies for multi-cell ISAC systems, analyzing coordinated beamforming and CoMP schemes with monostatic and bistatic sensing, optimizing for sensing accuracy and communication quality.

Contribution

It introduces a unified framework for designing robust precoders in multi-cell ISAC, incorporating CRB-based sensing metrics and addressing non-convex optimization with SDR and AO methods.

Findings

CoMP with SL precoding yields the best sensing and communication performance.

Neglecting inter-cell reflection and links degrades ISAC system performance.

BL precoding in CBF results in higher estimation errors for a given SINR.

Abstract

This paper proposes a framework for designing robust precoders for a multi-input single-output (MISO) system that performs integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) across multiple cells and users. We use Cramer-Rao-Bound (CRB) to measure the sensing performance and derive its expressions for two multi-cell scenarios, namely coordinated beamforming (CBF) and coordinated multi-point (CoMP). In the CBF scheme, a BS shares channel state information (CSI) and estimates target parameters using monostatic sensing. In contrast, a BS in the CoMP scheme shares the CSI and data, allowing bistatic sensing through inter-cell reflection. We consider both block-level (BL) and symbol-level (SL) precoding schemes for both the multi-cell scenarios that are robust to channel state estimation errors. The formulated optimization problems to minimize the CRB in estimating the parameters of a target and maximize the minimum communication signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) while satisfying a given total transmit power budget are non-convex. We tackle the non-convexity using a combination of semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and alternating optimization (AO) techniques. Simulations suggest that neglecting the inter-cell reflection and communication links degrades the performance of an ISAC system. The CoMP scenario employing SL precoding performs the best, whereas the BL precoding applied in the CBF scenario produces relatively high estimation error for a given minimum SINR value.