Integrated Sensing and Communication Beamforming Design Based on Mutual Information

Abstract: Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) unifies radar sensing and communication, and improves the efficiency of the spectrum, energy and hardware. In this paper, we investigate the ISAC beamforming design in a downlink system with a communication user and a point radar target to be perceived. The design criterion for radar sensing is the mutual information between the target response matrix and the echo signals, while the single user transmission rate is used as the performance metric of the communication. Two scenarios without and with interference from the communication user are investigated. A closed-form solution with low complexity and a solution based on the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) method are provided to solve these two problems, respectively. Numerical results demonstrate that, compared to the results obtained by SDR based on the CVX toolbox, the closed-form solution is tight in the feasible region. In addition, we show that the SDR method obtains an optimal solution.