Beamforming and Filter Design for Bistatic ISAC under Known and Unknown Transmit Symbols
TL;DR
Numerical results demonstrate that, while both approaches achieve comparable performance under per-slot optimization, knowledge of the transmitted symbols provides significant gains in multi-slot processing via coherent integration.
Abstract
This paper investigates the joint design of beamforming and radar receive filters in a multiuser bistatic integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system, aiming to maximize the minimum radar signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) under communications SINR and transmit power constraints. We consider two scenarios: transmitted signals are either known or unknown at the radar receiver. We develop tractable solutions to the resulting non-convex optimization problems in both cases. For the known-signal case, we derive closed-form radar receive filters and iteratively design beamforming using fractional programming (FP) and successive convex approximation (SCA). For the unknown case, we adopt an alternating optimization (AO) approach to jointly design the beamforming and receive filters. Numerical results demonstrate that, while both approaches achieve comparable performance under per-slot optimization, knowledge of the transmitted symbols provides significant gains in multi-slot processing via coherent integration. Moreover, the proposed ISAC designs perform close to the radar-only benchmark under moderate communication requirements.