Spatial Path Index Modulation in mmWave/THz Band Integrated Sensing and Communications

As the demand for wireless connectivity continues to soar, the fifth generation and beyond wireless networks are exploring new ways to efficiently utilize the wireless spectrum and reduce hardware costs. One such approach is the integration of sensing and communications (ISAC) paradigms to jointly access the spectrum. Recent ISAC studies have focused on upper millimeter-wave and low terahertz bands to exploit ultrawide bandwidths. At these frequencies, hybrid beamformers that employ fewer radio-frequency chains are employed to offset expensive hardware but at the cost of lower multiplexing gains. Wideband hybrid beamforming also suffers from the beam-split effect arising from the subcarrier-independent (SI) analog beamformers. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a spatial path index modulation (SPIM) ISAC architecture, which transmits additional information bits via modulating the spatial paths between the base station and communications users. We design the SPIM-ISAC beamformers by estimating both radar and communications parameters through our proposed beam-split-aware algorithms. We then develop a family of hybrid beamforming techniques – hybrid, SI, subcarrier-dependent analog-only, and beam-split-aware beamformers – for SPIM-ISAC. Numerical experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach exhibits significantly improved spectral efficiency performance in the presence of beam-split when compared with even fully digital non-SPIM beamformers.