Joint BS Selection, User Association, and Beamforming Design for Network Integrated Sensing and Communication

Different from conventional radar, the cellular network structure integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems enables collaborative sensing by multiple sensing nodes, e.g., base stations (BSs). However, existing works normally assume designated BSs as the sensing nodes, and thus can't fully exploit the macro-diversity gain. In the paper, we propose a joint BS selection, user association, and beamforming design to tackle this problem. In particular, we minimize the total transmit power by the above-mentioned joint design, while guaranteeing the communication and sensing performance measured by the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for the communication users and the Cramer-Rae lower bound (CRLB) for location estimation, respectively. An alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm is developed to solve the non-convex problem. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and unveil the benefits brought by collaborative sensing and BS selection.