Integrated Sensing and Communication in mmWave Wireless Backhaul Networks

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) becomes prevailing in wireless communications since it fully exploits the spectrum resources by incorporating data transmission and potential sensing functionalities of radio networks. With large bandwidth and directional communication, millimeter wave has the potentials for high data-rate communications and favorable time and spatial domain resolution, which can provide extensive sensing functionalities if properly utilized. Since self-backhauling at mmWave bands is considered a promising technology to enable high-throughput networks, we investigate how to embed ISAC functions into mmWave network by jointly considering high-speed data transmissions and high accuracy localization. To maximize the utilization of mmWave BSs for sensing and communication, we study the problem of optimal sensing task allocation taking into account target location, the requirements of different sensing tasks, user distribution, link scheduling, and data routing. With ISAC operations in mind, we analyze the time needed to complete each sensing task to facilitate problem formulation. To overcome the computational complexity in solution finding, we propose a sensing-oriented column generation (SOCG) scheme, which is shown to achieve near optimal performance via extensive performance evaluation. Furthermore, evaluation results demonstrate that the obtained sensing task allocation provides good throughput performance while ensuring the requirements of sensing tasks are satisfied.