Reshaping the ISAC Tradeoff Under OFDM Signaling: A Probabilistic Constellation Shaping Approach 

About this Topic:

Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) is widely recognized as a key technological driver for next-generation wireless systems. Exploiting orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication waveforms for sensing offers a low-cost and hardware-efficient approach toward practical ISAC deployment. However, the impact of communication randomness on sensing performance remains insufficiently quantified, and the sensing-communication trade-off is often difficult to flexibly adjust according to diverse service requirements. 

This webinar will present a theoretical framework that characterizes the randomness of the radar ambiguity function under communication signaling. By analyzing the matched filtering behavior, the presenters will reveal a fundamental result: sensing performance is determined by the fourth-order moment of constellation amplitudes. Based on this insight, they outline an optimal probabilistic constellation shaping strategy to achieve a controllable sensing-communication trade-off. The proposed approach depends only on the probability distribution of the transmitted constellation, without requiring channel state information or specific data realizations, leading to low complexity and practical implementability. Extensions of the framework to mismatched filtering conditions will also be discussed.

About the Presenters:

Zhen Du (M’22) received the B.Eng. degree in communication engineering from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, China, in 2016, and the Ph.D. degree in information and communication engineering from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, in 2022. 

He is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, China since September 2022. From June 2021 to May 2022, he was a Visiting Researcher with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China. His research interests include integrated sensing and communications, beam management in vehicular networks, and radar signal processing.

Dr. Du has served as a TPC Member of various international conferences, such as IEEE ICC, IEEE GLOBECOM and IEEE WCNC, and a special session co-chair of IEEE SAM 2026 and IEEE ICICSP 2025.

Yifeng Xiong received the B.S. degree in information engineering as well as the M.S. degree (with highest honor) in information and communication engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), Beijing, China and the Ph.D. degree in electronic and electrical engineering from the University of Southampton, UK, in 2015, 2018 and 2022, respectively. 

He is currently an Associate Professor at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT). His research interests include integrated sensing and communications, quantum computation, quantum information theory, and statistical inference over networks. 

Dr. Xiong was a recipient of the 2025 IEEE Communication Society & Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, the Best Paper Award of IEEE Globecom 2025, the Best Paper Award of IEEE/CIC ICCC 2023, and the Best Master Thesis Award of Chinese Institute of Electronics.

Fan Liu received the B.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT), Beijing, China, in 2013 and 2018, respectively.

He is currently a Professor with the National Mobile Communications Research Laboratory, School of Information Science and Engineering, Southeast University, Nanjing, China. Prior to that, he was an Assistant Professor with the Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China, from 2020 to 2024. He has previously held academic positions in the University College London (UCL), London, UK, as a Visiting Researcher from 2016 to 2018, and a Marie Curie Research Fellow from 2018 to 2020. His research interests lie in the general area of signal processing and wireless communications, and in particular in the area of Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC).

Dr. Liu is the founding Academic Chair of the IEEE ComSoc ISAC Emerging Technology Initiative (ISAC-ETI), Vice Chair and founding member of the IEEE SPS ISAC Technical Working Group (ISAC-TWG), an elected member of the IEEE SPS Sensor Array and Multichannel Technical Committee (SAMTC), an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing, and IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing, and a Guest Editor of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, IEEE Wireless Communications, and IEEE Vehicular Technology Magazine. He was a TPC Co-Chair of the 2nd4th IEEE Joint Communication and Sensing (JC&S) Symposium, a Symposium Co-Chair for the IEEE ICC 2026 and IEEE GLOBECOM 2023, and a Track Co-Chair for the IEEE WCNC 2024. He is a member of the IMT-2030 (6G) ISAC Task Group. He was listed among the Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in 2025, and among the Elsevier Highly Cited Chinese Researchers from 2023 to 2024. He was a recipient of numerous Best Paper Awards, including the 2025 IEEE Communications Society \& Information Theory Society Joint Paper Award, 2024 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award, 2024 IEEE Signal Processing Society Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award, 2024 IEEE Communications Society Asia-Pacific Outstanding Paper Award, 2023 IEEE Communications Society Stephan O. Rice Prize, and 2021 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award. He is a Senior Member of the IEEE