Multiuser MIMO Wideband Joint Communications and Sensing with Subcarrier Allocation

About this Topic:

In wideband integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems, conventional designs optimize dual-functional waveforms over the entire bandwidth. This approach significantly restricts beamforming flexibility and degrades communications performance under strict radar sensing constraints. This webinar presents a novel subcarrier allocation strategy to enhance the communications–sensing performance tradeoff in ISAC. The proposed method selectively assigns a subset of subcarriers for radar sensing while enabling communication across the full bandwidth. This ensures dedicated subcarriers for communications without radar interference, while maintaining sensing accuracy. To realize this idea, the presenters formulate a sum rate maximization problem and propose a three-step solution with efficient initialization methods to reduce computational complexity and improve convergence. Their simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a 70% improvement in sum rate while maintaining the same radar beampattern accuracy and requiring fewer RF chains compared to conventional wideband ISAC designs.

About the Presenters:

Nhan Thanh Nguyen received the B.S. degree in electronics and telecommunications engineering from the Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam, in 2014, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and information engineering from the Seoul National University of Science and Technology, Seoul, South Korea, in 2017 and 2020, respectively.

He is currently an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Wireless Communications, University of Oulu, Finland, where he worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher from September 2020 to January 2023. His research interests include signal processing, optimization, and applied machine learning for wireless communications and sensing.

Dr. Nguyen was the recipient of the Best M.S. Thesis Award (2017), Best Ph.D. Dissertation Award (2020), Best Paper Awards at the IEEE SPAWC 2023, IEEE SSP 2023, and ATC 2021.

Nir Shlezinger received the B.Sc., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees in in electrical and computer engineering, from Ben-Gurion University, Israel, in 2011, 2013, and 2017, respectively.

He is currently an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. From 2017 to 2019, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Technion, and from 2019 to 2020, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Weizmann Institute of Science, where he was awarded the FGS Prize for his research achievements. His research interests include communications, information theory, signal processing, and machine learning.

Dr. Shlezinger is the recipient of the 2024 IEEE ComSoc Fred W. Ellersick Award, and the 2024 Krill Prize for outstanding young researchers.