Simultaneous Imaging & Uplink Communication: A Degrees of Freedom Perspective

In this paper, we take the first step towards establishing the fundamental limits for simultaneous imaging and uplink communication. For a dual-function base station, we derive outer and inner bounds on the degrees of freedom region, which determines the resolution and rate combinations that can be simultaneously supported by the system in the high signal-to-noise ratio regime. We also propose a scheme, decode-and-image, that exploits known/decoded uplink data as additional imaging illumination. We establish the optimality of decode-and-image in certain special regimes. Furthermore, we show that decode-and-image outperforms schemes such as TDMA that do not jointly process the imaging and communication signals.