Hybrid Beamforming for Integrated Sensing and Communications With Low Resolution DACs

TL;DR

This paper proposes a hybrid beamforming design for integrated sensing and communications systems using low-resolution DACs, balancing spectral efficiency, sensing accuracy, and hardware constraints.

Contribution

It introduces the HANDBALL approach with a greedy algorithm for analog beamforming and accounts for quantization distortion in low-resolution DAC design.

Findings

Effective spectral efficiency with low-resolution DACs.

Satisfactory sensing and communication performance for one-bit and few-bit designs.

Robust hybrid beamforming design considering hardware constraints.

Abstract

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) has emerged as a means to efficiently utilize spectrum and thereby save cost and power. At the higher end of the spectrum, ISAC systems operate at wideband using large antenna arrays to meet the stringent demands for high-resolution sensing and enhanced communications capacity. On the other hand, the overall design should satisfy energy-efficiency and hardware constraints such as operating on low resolution components for a practical scenario. Therefore, this paper presents the design of Hybrid ANalog and Digital BeAmformers with Low resoLution (HANDBALL) digital-to-analog converters (DACs). We introduce a greedy-search-based approach to design the analog beamformers for multi-user multi-target ISAC scenario. Then, the quantization distortion is taken into account in order to design the baseband beamformer with low resolution DACs. We evaluated performance of the proposed HANDBALL technique in terms of both spectral efficiency and sensing beampattern, providing a satisfactory sensing and communication performance for both one-bit and few-bit designs.