Efficient Global Algorithms for Transmit Beamforming Design in ISAC Systems

In this paper, we propose a MIMO transmit beamforming optimization model for joint radar sensing and multi-user communications, where the design of the beamformers is formulated as an optimization problem whose objective is a weighted combination of the sum rate and the Cramér-Rao bound, subject to the transmit power budget. Obtaining the global solution for the formulated nonconvex problem is a challenging task, since the sum-rate maximization problem itself (even without considering the sensing metric) is known to be NP-hard. The main contributions of this paper are threefold. Firstly, we derive an optimal closed-form solution to the formulated problem in the single-user case and the multi-user case where the channel vectors of different users are orthogonal. Secondly, for the general multi-user case, we propose a novel branch and bound (B&B) algorithm based on the McCormick envelope relaxation. The proposed algorithm is guaranteed to find the globally optimal solution to the formulated problem. Thirdly, we design a graph neural network (GNN) based pruning policy to determine irrelevant nodes that can be directly pruned in the proposed B&B algorithm, thereby significantly reducing the number of unnecessary enumerations therein and improving its computational efficiency. Simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed vanilla and GNN-based accelerated B&B algorithms.