Precoding Design for Multi-User MIMO Joint Communications and Sensing

TL;DR

This paper explores precoding strategies for multi-user MIMO systems that jointly support communication and sensing, analyzing how interference affects performance and proposing methods to optimize both functions.

Contribution

It introduces indicators for sensing and communication performance and demonstrates how communication signals can be used for sensing without degrading communication quality.

Findings

Using communication signals for sensing can prevent performance loss due to interference.

The kurtosis of the transmit alphabet limits sensing performance.

Simulation results validate the proposed analysis and methods.

Abstract

We investigate precoding for multi-user (MU) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) joint communications and sensing (JCAS) systems, taking into account the potential interference between sensing and communication channels. We derive indicators for the sensing and communication performance, i.e., the detection probability and the communication signal-to-interference-and-noise ratio (SINR) for general input signals. Our results show that the use of the communication signal for sensing can prevent a loss in communication performance if channel interference occurs, while the kurtosis of the transmit alphabet of the communication signal limits the sensing performance. We present simulation results of example setups.