Low-Complexity Joint Transceiver Optimization for MmWave/THz MU-MIMO ISAC Systems

In this article, we consider the problem of joint transceiver design for millimeter-wave (mmWave)/terahertz (THz) multiuser MIMO integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. Such a problem is formulated into a nonconvex optimization problem, with the objective of maximizing a weighted sum of communication users’ rates and the passive radar’s signal-to-clutter-and-noise ratio (SCNR). By exploring a low-dimensional subspace property of the optimal precoder, a low-dimensional subspace property-inspired block-coordinate-descent (LS-BCD)-based algorithm is proposed with remarkably reduced computational complexity. Our analysis reveals that the hybrid analog/digital beamforming structure can attain the same performance as that of a fully digital precoder, provided that the number of radio frequency (RF) chains is no less than the number of resolvable signal paths. Also, through expressing the precoder as a sum of a communication-precoder and a sensing-precoder, we develop an analytical solution to the joint transceiver design problem by generalizing the idea of block diagonalization (BD) to the ISAC system. Simulation results show that with a proper tradeoff parameter, the proposed methods can achieve a decent compromise between communication and sensing, where the performance of each communication/sensing task experiences only a mild performance loss as compared with the performance attained by optimizing exclusively for a single task.