Priority-Based Sensing Strategy for ISAC Systems With Primary and Secondary Targets

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) holds significant commercial potential in future 6G. The 3GPP technical report indicates that it is crucial to prioritize the sensing services of the ISAC system to ensure the efficient execution of critical services due to resource-constrained environments. Thus, this paper investigates priority-based resource allocation in ISAC systems, where an ISAC base station (BS) simultaneously serves a communication user (CU) and detects both a primary sensing target (PST) and a secondary sensing target (SST). First, A priority criteria for this ISAC system is proposed: 1) Above all, to ensure that the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for PST is maintained below a threshold; 2) Following this, the CRB of the SST should be optimized, while ensuring the communication spectral efficiency is preserved. Then, based on this criterion, three cases are derived, and for each case, a distinct resource allocation problem is formulated, yielding closed-form or semi-closed-form expressions of the optimal resource allocation for each problem. Furthermore, An algorithm is also proposed to determine the occurrence of each case and provide the corresponding optimal resource allocation. In addition, system performance under each case is analyzed based on these expressions. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the impact of the priority strategy on performance, which is consistent with the previous performance analysis.