Channel Sharing Aided Integrated Sensing and Communication: An Energy-Efficient Sensing Scheduling Approach

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a promising paradigm for supporting emerging wireless services and applications that require both high-throughput data transmission and accurate environment sensing. In this paper, we investigate the energy-efficient channel sharing aided ISAC with sensing scheduling, in which the ISAC base station (BS) can simultaneously sense multiple targets by reusing the channel of conventional cellular users. To investigate this problem, we formulate a joint optimization of the multi-target sensing scheduling, the BS's transmitting beamforming, and its receiving beamforming for each sensing target, with the objective of maximizing the energy efficiency for radar sensing while guaranteeing each cellular user's throughput requirement. Despite that the formulated joint optimization problem is strictly non-convex, we exploit a framework of alternating optimization and propose the corresponding algorithms for solving the problem. Specifically, we address the fractional structure of the objective function by utilizing Dinkelbach's method. Then, we identify the convexity of the problem after semidefinite relaxation and obtain the beamforming by utilizing the Lagrange duality. Furthermore, we formulate the sensing scheduling problem as a matching game and solve it by adopting the swap matching. Numerical results validate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms compared to some benchmark algorithms and show the performance advantage of our channel sharing aided ISAC in comparison with different schemes.