CoMP ISAC Design Adopting Distinct Symbol Durations and Waveforms

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) based on coordinated multi-point (CoMP) can provide enhanced sensing and communication capabilities. However, existing CoMP ISAC designs are mostly based on sensing and communication with the same symbol duration and waveform, which greatly restricts the range resolution of sensing and the separation of multiple echoes of the target. In this paper, we propose a new CoMP ISAC design employing distinct symbol durations and waveforms. It can achieve high-resolution range sensing of the target with short sensing symbol durations and distinguish target echoes from different transmitting stations (TXs) with orthogonal sensing waveforms. First, we derive the average spectral efficiency of communication and the detection probability of sensing as the performance metrics of the two functionalities, respectively. Then, an efficient CoMP beamforming design is proposed to maximize the communication performance under the constraints on the maximum transmit power of each TX and the required sensing performance. Moreover, a distributed implementation of the above beamforming design is proposed to reduce the computational burden of the central controller. Finally, a low-complexity design based on linear beamforming structures is presented. Numerical results verifies the effectiveness of the proposed designs.