Waveform Design for Communication-Assisted Sensing in 6G Perceptive Networks

The integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technique has the potential to achieve coordination gain by exploiting the mutual assistance between sensing and communication (S&C) functions. While the sensing-assisted communications (SAC) technology has been extensively studied for high-mobility scenarios, the communication-assisted sensing (CAS) counterpart remains widely unexplored. This paper presents a waveform design framework for CAS in 6G perceptive networks, aiming to attain an optimal sensing quality of service (QoS) at the user after the target’s parameters successively "pass-through" the S&C channels. In particular, a pair of transmission schemes, namely, separated S&C and dual-functional waveform designs, are proposed to optimize the sensing QoS under the constraints of the rate-distortion and power budget. The first scheme reveals a power allocation trade-off, while the latter presents a water-filling trade-off. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms, where the dual-functional scheme exhibits approximately 25% performance gain compared to its separated waveform design counterpart.