Symbol-Scaling Based Interference Exploitation in ISAC Systems: From Symbol Level to Block Level

In this paper, we investigate the constructive interference (CI) based symbol-level precoding (SLP) design for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems, where a multi-antenna base station (BS) serves multiple single-antenna communication users while simultaneously detecting targets of interest. Specifically, the minimum communication CI scaling factor among the users is maximized under radar performance constraint and power constraint. In order to solve the proposed optimization problem, two groups of approximate feasible domains are adopted to transform the optimization problem into convex. In order to improve the efficiency of the proposed precoding scheme, we adopt a modified Hooke-Jeeves pattern search algorithm for the convex subproblems. We further propose a weighted optimization scheme which considers the tradeoff between radar performance and communication performance as the objective function. By analyzing the Lagrangian function and Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) condition of the weighted optimization problem, we formulate the corresponding dual problem, which is a simple quadratic programming (QP) problem and can be easily solved. In addition, we further extend the proposed CI precoding scheme from symbol level to block level, in order to be more consistent with the currently used communication systems and achieve better ISAC performance. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the advantages and the effectiveness of the proposed symbol-scaling based CI-SLP design and CI-based block-level precoding (CI-BLP) design in ISAC systems.