Perceptive Mobile Network With Distributed Target Monitoring Terminals: Leaking Communication Energy for Sensing

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) creates a platform to exploit the synergy between two powerful functionalities that have been developing separately. However, the interference management and resource allocation between sensing and communication have not been fully studied. In this paper, we consider the design of perceptive mobile networks (PMNs) by adding sensing capability to current cellular networks. To avoid full-duplex operation, we propose the PMN with distributed target monitoring terminals (TMTs) where passive TMTs are deployed over wireless networks to locate the sensing target (ST). To manage the interference between sensing and communication, we jointly optimize the transmit and receive beamformers towards the communication user equipment (UEs) and the ST by alternating-optimization (AO) and prove its convergence. To reduce computation complexity and obtain physical insights, we further investigate the use of linear transceivers, including zero forcing and beam synthesis (B-syn). Our analysis revealed interesting physical insights: 1) instead of forming dedicated sensing signals, it is more efficient to redesign the communication signals for both communication and sensing purposes and “leak” communication energy for sensing; 2) the amount of energy leakage from one UE to the ST depends on their relative locations.