Movable Antenna Enabled Integrated Sensing and Communication

TL;DR

This paper introduces a movable antenna system for integrated sensing and communication, optimizing beamforming and antenna positions to significantly enhance system performance over fixed antennas.

Contribution

It proposes a novel movable antenna design and an optimization framework for joint beamforming and antenna positioning in ISAC systems, demonstrating substantial performance gains.

Findings

Movable antennas provide additional degrees of freedom for beamforming.

The proposed optimization algorithm effectively maximizes communication and sensing mutual information.

Simulation shows nearly 60% performance improvement over fixed antenna systems.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate a novel integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system aided by movable antennas (MAs). A bistatic radar system, in which the base station (BS) is configured with MAs, is integrated into a multi-user multiple-input-single-output (MU-MISO) system. Flexible beamforming is studied by jointly optimizing the antenna coefficients and the antenna positions. Compared to conventional fixed-position antennas (FPAs), MAs provide a new degree of freedom (DoF) in beamforming to reconfigure the field response, and further improve the received signal quality for both wireless communication and sensing. We propose a communication rate and sensing mutual information (MI) maximization problem by flexible beamforming optimization. The complex fractional objective function with logarithms are first transformed with the fractional programming (FP) framework. Then, we propose an efficient algorithm to address the non-convex problem with coupled variables by alternatively solving four sub-problems. We derive the closed-form expression to update the antenna coefficients by Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. To improve the direct gradient ascent (DGA) scheme in updating the positions of the antennas, a 3-stage search-based projected GA (SPGA) method is proposed. Simulation results show that MAs significantly enhance the overall performance of the ISAC system, achieving 59.8\% performance gain compared to conventional ISAC system enabled by FPAs. Meanwhile, the proposed SPGA-based method has remarkable performance improvement compared the DGA method in antenna position optimization.