Mutual Coupling Exploitation for ISAC System with Tunable Antenna Load

Integrated Sensing and Communications (ISAC) is emerged as one of the key technologies in next generation wireless systems. However, ISAC systems have been commonly explored neglecting mutual coupling. This paper investigates the mutual coupling exploitation to further improve the performance of ISAC systems. We aim to maximize the sensing beampatern gain by optimizing the tunable loads and the dual-functional beamforming while satisfying the minimum signal-to-interference-plus-noise (SINR) per user and the hardware constraint of the tunable loads. To solve the non-convex problem, we propose a penaltybased iterative algorithm to obtain a stationary point. Specifically, in each iteration we adopt the block coordinate descent (BCD) method where the dual-functional beamforming is obtained by using Lagrange duality, and the tunable loads are solved with closed forms. Numerical results demonstrate the notable gains and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms compared to the baseline schemes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study utilizing the MC effect to improve system performance in an ISAC system with tunable loads.