Rotatable Antennas for Integrated Sensing and Communications

In this letter, we propose to deploy rotatable antennas (RAs) at the base station (BS) to enhance both communication and sensing (C&S) performance, by exploiting a new spatial degree-of-freedom (DoF) offered by array rotation. Specifically, we formulate a multi-objective optimization problem to simultaneously maximize the sum-rate of multiple communication users and minimize the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for target angle estimation, by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming vectors and the array rotation angle at the BS. To solve this problem, we first equivalently decompose it into two subproblems, corresponding to an inner problem for beamforming optimization and an outer problem for array rotation optimization. Although these two subproblems are non-convex, we obtain their high-quality solutions by applying the block coordinate descent (BCD) technique and one-dimensional exhaustive search, respectively. Moreover, we show that for the communication-only case, RAs provide an additional rotation gain to improve communication performance; while for the sensing-only case, the equivalent spatial aperture can be enlarged by RAs for achieving higher sensing accuracy. Finally, numerical results are presented to showcase the performance gains of RAs over fixed-rotation antennas in integrated sensing and communications (ISAC).