A Sensing-Then-Communication Architecture for Low Latency MIMO Ad Hoc Networks: Design and Optimization

Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) ad hoc networks have emerged as a promising approach to enhance network capacity, coverage, and reliability in dynamic, decentralized environments. Inspired by integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) principles, this paper proposes a novel sensing-then-communication architecture, tailored to meet the challenges of delivering latency-sensitive services in rapidly changing MIMO ad hoc networks. The architecture divides time resources into encoding sensing, routing sensing, and data transmission phases, ensuring real-time updates that support adaptive routing and efficient resource allocation. Within this architecture, we optimize resource allocation for sensing and communication, proposing an alternating optimization (AO) approach to balance the sensing precision for point-to-point channel state information (CSI) and the sensing range for multi-hop routing link state information (LSI), minimizing overhead while maximizing network performance. Closed-form expressions for both sensing precision and range are derived through approximations. Numerical simulations validate the proposed architecture and joint optimization algorithm, demonstrating significant latency reductions of up to 51.00%, alongside improvements in resource utilization. These results underscore the effectiveness of the proposed framework in optimizing performance for latency-sensitive applications within MIMO ad hoc networks.