2024 | Kaitao Meng, Member, IEEE, Christos Masouros Fellow, IEEE, Athina P. Petropulu, Fellow, IEEE, and Lajos Hanzo, Life Fellow, IEEE
This paper investigates the performance of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) networks, focusing on the balance between sensing and communication (S&C) performance at the network level. The authors propose a novel cooperative ISAC scheme that combines multipoint (CoMP) coordinated joint transmission and distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar techniques. By leveraging stochastic geometry, they analyze the S&C performance, revealing key cooperative dependencies and optimizing network-level parameters. A significant finding is that deploying N ISAC transceivers improves average cooperative sensing performance according to the $ \ln^{2}N $ scaling law, which is less pronounced than the $ N^{2} $ performance gain when transceivers are equidistant from the target due to path loss effects. The paper also derives a tight expression for communication rate and presents a low-complexity algorithm to determine the optimal cooperative cluster size. The authors formulate an optimization problem to maximize network performance in terms of two joint S&C metrics, jointly optimizing cooperative BS cluster sizes and transmit power. Simulation results show that the proposed cooperative ISAC scheme outperforms conventional time-sharing and non-cooperative schemes in terms of average data rate and CRLB reduction, achieving a better S&C performance tradeoff. The study highlights the importance of balancing S&C performance gains with control signaling costs and provides insights into the network-level tradeoffs in ISAC systems.This paper investigates the performance of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) networks, focusing on the balance between sensing and communication (S&C) performance at the network level. The authors propose a novel cooperative ISAC scheme that combines multipoint (CoMP) coordinated joint transmission and distributed multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar techniques. By leveraging stochastic geometry, they analyze the S&C performance, revealing key cooperative dependencies and optimizing network-level parameters. A significant finding is that deploying N ISAC transceivers improves average cooperative sensing performance according to the $ \ln^{2}N $ scaling law, which is less pronounced than the $ N^{2} $ performance gain when transceivers are equidistant from the target due to path loss effects. The paper also derives a tight expression for communication rate and presents a low-complexity algorithm to determine the optimal cooperative cluster size. The authors formulate an optimization problem to maximize network performance in terms of two joint S&C metrics, jointly optimizing cooperative BS cluster sizes and transmit power. Simulation results show that the proposed cooperative ISAC scheme outperforms conventional time-sharing and non-cooperative schemes in terms of average data rate and CRLB reduction, achieving a better S&C performance tradeoff. The study highlights the importance of balancing S&C performance gains with control signaling costs and provides insights into the network-level tradeoffs in ISAC systems.