RSMA Assisted ISAC with Hybrid Beamforming

The harsh environment and scarce resources post-disaster drive the equipment to be miniaturized and portable. Based on this, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems play a significant role in providing emergency wireless networks. In order to reduce the hardware cost, a hybrid beamforming (HBF) assisted millimeter-wave (mmWave) ISAC system, which exploits the limited number of radio frequency (RF) chains, is considered in this paper. However, the HBF structure reduces the spatial degrees of freedom, thus leading to increased interference among communication users and radar sensing. To solve this problem, a rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) strategy is adopted to enhance the emergency mmWave-ISAC system. We formulate the weighted sum rate (WSR) maximization objective by jointly designing common rate allocation and HBF. Then, we propose the penalty dual decomposition (PDD) coupled with the weighted mean squared error (WMMSE) method to solve this high-dimensional non-convex problem. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and show that the RSMA-ISAC scheme outperforms other benchmark schemes.