Multi-Functional Beamforming Design for Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computation

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems may face a heavy computation burden since the sensory data needs to be further processed. This paper studies a novel system that integrates sensing, communication, and computation, aiming to provide services for different objectives efficiently. This system consists of a multi-antenna multi-functional base station (BS), an edge server, a target, and multiple single-antenna communication users. The BS needs to allocate the available resources to efficiently provide sensing, communication, and computation services. Due to the heavy service burden and limited power budget, the BS can partially offload the tasks to the nearby edge server instead of computing them locally. We consider the estimation of the target response matrix, a general problem in radar sensing, and utilize Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) as the corresponding performance metric. To tackle the non-convex optimization problem, we propose both semidefinite relaxation (SDR)-based alternating optimization and SDR-based successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithms to minimize the CRB of radar sensing while meeting the requirement of communication users and the need for task computing. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the optimal rank-one solutions of both the alternating and SCA algorithms can be directly obtained via the solver or further constructed even when dealing with multiple functionalities. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithms can provide higher target estimation performance than state-of-the-art benchmarks while satisfying the communication and computation constraints.