Digital Twin Assisted Beamforming Design for Integrated Sensing and Communication Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a digital twin-based beamforming approach for integrated sensing and communication systems, using environment modeling to optimize target detection and communication performance simultaneously.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel digital twin-assisted beamforming design that predicts channel paths and optimizes joint sensing and communication in ISAC systems.

Findings

Achieves near-optimal sensing SNR in LoS and NLoS areas.

Ensures minimum communication SINR requirements.

Demonstrates potential of digital twins in ISAC applications.

Abstract

This paper explores a novel research direction where a digital twin is leveraged to assist the beamforming design for an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system. In this setup, a base station designs joint communication and sensing beamforming to serve the communication user and detect the sensing target concurrently. Utilizing the electromagnetic (EM) 3D model of the environment and ray tracing, the digital twin can provide various information, e.g., propagation path parameters and wireless channels, to aid communication and sensing systems. More specifically, our digital twin-based beamforming design first leverages the environment EM 3D model and ray tracing to (i) predict the directions of the line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) sensing channel paths and (ii) identify the dominant one among these sensing channel paths. Then, to optimize the joint sensing and communication beam, we maximize the sensing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) on the dominant sensing channel component while satisfying a minimum communication signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) requirement. Simulation results show that the proposed digital twin-assisted beamforming design achieves near-optimal target sensing SNR in both LoS and NLoS dominant areas, while ensuring the required SINR for the communication user. This highlights the potential of leveraging digital twins to assist ISAC systems.