Time Allocation Approaches for a Perceptive Mobile Network Using Integration of Sensing and Communication

One of the main challenges of popularizing the integration of sensing and communication (ISAC) network is mutual interference between the two functions. A viable solution is the time division scheme where communication and sensing are separated in time domain. This paper considers a multi-cluster ISAC network model, where the time-domain radio resources are allocated to sensing and communication. At the same time, the time resources can be reused in space-domain. Particularly, the terminals in different work phases can access radio resources of different or the same clusters simultaneously, depending on interference. In this way, the interference is isolated while the resources utilization is improved. Two different resource allocation approaches are proposed according to how interference is considered. The aim is to maximize the sensing detection probability under the constraint of network throughput. The performance improvement in terms of target detection probability brought by the proposed schemes is shown by numerical results compared with benchmark methods.