Integrated Sensing And Communication In Unlicensed Mmwave Bands: Joint Beamforming Training And Energy Allocation

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) within the unlicensed millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency bands has been emerged as a pivotal technology in the next generation wireless communication era. However, the interference management issue between sensing and communication becomes much severe due to the absence of centralized scheduling function of the widely existed WiGig networks with the IEEE 802.11ay protocol in the unlicensed mmWave bands. In this way, we aim to investigate an efficient ISAC scheme for the promising WiGig networks via embedding radar pulses into the IEEE 802.11ay beamforming training (BFT) period. Particularly, we transmit both radar pulses and communication signals by exploiting the sector-level sweep of the WiGig network. Since there is a trade-off between radar detection/sensing and mmWave communication under diverse resource assignments, we propose a joint BFT and energy allocation strategy to find an achievable balance. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

1. INTRODUCTION

With the advancements of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), WiFi networks in unlicensed bands with both sensing and communication functions has increasing attractive attentions due to the great potential for emerging applications, such as smart home, healthcare, security surveillance, and so on [1]–[3]. The WiGig network, operating in the 60 GHz unlicensed millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands, is regarded as a promising candidate for future ISAC applications [4]–[6]. Based on [7], ISAC in the WiGig network can not only provide unprecedented throughput, but also ensure high sensing accuracy due to the fruitful bandwidth resources.