DOA Estimation-Oriented Joint Array Partitioning and Beamforming Designs for ISAC Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a joint array partitioning and beamforming design for ISAC systems to improve DOA estimation accuracy while balancing communication and sensing performance, using an iterative optimization algorithm.

Contribution

It introduces a novel joint design framework for array partitioning and beamforming in ISAC systems, optimizing DOA estimation error with an efficient algorithm.

Findings

Significantly reduces DOA estimation error in simulations.

Effectively balances communication and sensing performance.

Provides a computationally efficient heuristic strategy.

Abstract

Integrated sensing and communication has been identified as an enabling technology for forthcoming wireless networks. In an effort to achieve an improved performance trade-off between multiuser communications and radar sensing, this paper considers a dynamically-partitioned antenna array architecture for monostatic ISAC systems, in which each element of the array at the base station can function as either a transmit or receive antenna. To fully exploit the available spatial degrees of freedom for both communication and sensing functions, we jointly design the partitioning of the array between transmit and receive antennas together with the transmit beamforming in order to minimize the direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation error, while satisfying constraints on the communication signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and the transmit power budget. An alternating algorithm based on Dinkelbach's transform, the alternative direction method of multipliers, and majorization-minimization is developed to solve the resulting complicated optimization problem. To reduce the computational complexity, we also present a heuristic three-step strategy that optimizes the transmit beamforming after determining the antenna partitioning. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms in significantly reducing the DOA estimation error.