NOMA Empowered Integrated Sensing and Communication

Abstract: A non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) empowered integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework is investigated. A dual-functional base station serves multiple communication users employing NOMA, while the superimposed NOMA communication signal is simultaneously exploited for target sensing. A beamforming design problem is formulated to maximize the weighted sum of the communication throughput and the effective sensing power. To solve this problem, an efficient double-layer penalty-based algorithm is proposed by invoking successive convex approximation. Numerical results show that the proposed NOMA-ISAC outperforms the conventional ISAC in the underloaded regime experiencing highly correlated channels and in the overloaded regime.