Strong Converses for Memoryless Bi-Static ISAC

The paper characterizes the fundamental limits of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems with a bi-static radar, where the radar receiver is located close to the transmitter and estimates or detects the state based on the transmitter’s channel inputs and the backscattered signals. Two models are considered. In the first model, the memoryless state sequence is distributed according to a fixed distribution and the goal of the radar receiver is to reconstruct this state-sequence with smallest possible distortion. In the second model, the memoryless state is distributed either according to P
S
or to Q
S
and the radar’s goal is to detect this underlying distribution so that the missed-detection error probability has maximum exponential decay-rate (maximum Stein exponent). Similarly to previous results, our fundamental limits show that the tradeoff between sensing and communication solely stems from the empirical statistics of the transmitted codewords which influences both performances. The main technical contribution are two strong converse proofs that hold for all probabilities of communication error ϵ and excess-distortion probability or false-alarm probability δ summing to less than 1, ϵ+δ < 1. These proofs are based on two parallel change-of-measure arguments on the sets of typical sequences, one change-of-measure to obtain the desired bound on the communication rate, and the second to bound the sensing performance.