Quasi-Orthogonal SFBC for Monostatic MIMO ISAC Scenarios

This paper studies the performance of the quasi-orthogonal Tirkkonen spatial-frequency block code (SFBC) for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) scenarios. The considered scenario is a MIMO monostatic ISAC base station (BS), where transmitter and radar antenna arrays are co-located enabling the virtual array concept. The quasi-orthogonal Tirkkonen SFBC is encapsulated in an OFDM waveform, the radar processing is performed over the resulting OFDM frame. The performance in terms of radar and communication metrics of Tirkkonen SFBC is presented and compared with orthogonal Alamouti SFBC and the spectrally interleaved waveform approach, widely used in radar-like scenarios. The resulting Mean Square Error (MSE) of the Angle of Arrival (AoA) is chosen as the radar metric while the bit-error-rate (BER) is used to present the communication performance. The results show that Tirkkonen is a good candidate for future ISAC scenarios.