Performance Analysis of a Multistatic Joint Sensing and Communication System

In this work, we consider a multistatic joint sensing and communication network composed of a transmitter and multiple receivers capable of estimating the position of a target in the monitored area. In particular, the system consists of a transmitter equipped with multiple antennas (typically a base station) and several receivers that can act as sensors with a single antenna. The transmitter adopts multiple beams to accommodate the communication towards the user equipment and the sensing functionality, with the ability to split the power between the two beams to adjust the sensing/communication trade-off. Processing of target echoes by the sensors produces a bistatic distance estimate or soft maps, which are combined by the fusion center. We then propose two sensor data fusion strategies, least square and soft maps fusion; the former has a negligible impact on the network overhead, while the latter always provides better performance in terms of root mean squared error of target position estimation when considering a small fraction of power devoted to sensing. Finally, we highlight the benefits of cooperation offered by the multistatic configuration, compared to the bistatic one, in terms of power saving for sensing.