Distributed Distortion-Aware Robust Optimization for Movable Antenna-aided Cell-Free ISAC Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a robust optimization framework for movable antenna-enabled cell-free ISAC systems that mitigates hardware distortion effects, improving communication and sensing performance in 6G deployments.

Contribution

It proposes a distributed, distortion-aware robust optimization method incorporating uncertainty in PA nonlinearities and introduces a novel SACGNN algorithm for efficient joint beamforming and antenna positioning.

Findings

Significantly improves robustness against PA distortion.

Enhances the communication-sensing trade-off.

Outperforms fixed antenna systems in simulations.

Abstract

The cell-free integrated sensing and communication (CF-ISAC) architecture is a promising enabler for 6G, offering spectrum efficiency and ubiquitous coverage. However, real deployments suffer from hardware impairments, especially nonlinear distortion from power amplifiers (PAs), which degrades both communication and sensing. To address this, we propose a movable antenna (MA)-aided CF-ISAC system that mitigates distortion and enhances robustness. The PAs nonlinearities are modeled by a third-order memoryless polynomial, where the third-order distortion coefficients (3RDCs) vary across access points (APs) due to hardware differences, aging, and environmental conditions. We design a distributed distortion-aware worst-case robust optimization framework that explicitly incorporates uncertainty in 3RDCs. First, we analyze the worst-case impact of PA distortion on both the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) and communication rate. Then, to address the resulting non-convexity, we apply successive convex approximation (SCA) for estimating the 3RDCs. With these, we jointly optimize beamforming and MA positions under transmit power and sensing constraints. To efficiently solve this highly non-convex problem, we develop an MA-enabled self-attention convolutional graph neural network (SACGNN) algorithm. Simulations demonstrate that our method substantially enhances the communication-sensing trade-off under distortion and outperforms fixed-position antenna baselines in terms of robustness and capacity, thereby highlighting the advantages of MA-aided CF-ISAC systems.