Near-Field Multi-Cell ISCAP with Extremely Large-Scale Antenna Array

Abstract: This paper investigates a coordinated multi-cell integrated sensing, communication, and powering (ISCAP) system operating in the electromagnetic near field, where each base station (BS) employs an extremely large-scale antenna array (ELAA) to simultaneously support downlink communication, wireless power transfer (WPT), and environmental sensing. Three categories of communication users (CUs) with different interference cancellation capabilities are considered, and sensing is enabled through a distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar architecture. To address the resulting design challenges, a robust optimization framework is proposed by optimizing the beamforming strategy to maximize the worst-case detection probability over a prescribed sensing region, subject to per-user signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints and energy harvesting requirements at energy receivers (ERs), while explicitly capturing the uncertainty in ER locations. By leveraging semidefinite relaxation (SDR), the original non-convex problem is reformulated as a convex semidefinite program with a provably tight relaxation. Furthermore, a low-complexity maximum ratio transmission (MRT)-based suboptimal scheme is developed, yielding a closed-form solution in the asymptotic regime as the number of antenna elements approaches infinity. Extensive numerical results reveal the fundamental trade-offs among sensing accuracy, communication reliability, and WPT efficiency.