Optimal Beamforming for Optical Wireless Integrated Sensing and Communication Based on Optical Phased Array

Optical wireless integrated sensing and communication (OW-ISAC) is emerging as a crucial technology to complement and augment its radio-frequency counterpart. In this paper, we propose an optical phased array (OPA)-based OW-ISAC framework to serve multiple communication user equipments and conduct sensing for the direction of interest simultaneously. The system model for OPA-based OW-ISAC is introduced, where the optical beamforming process, atmospheric channel, and operational principles of communication and sensing subsystems are elaborated. In addition, the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and integrated sidelobe ratio are derived as the performance metrics to evaluate OW-ISAC. Subsequently, an optimization problem for beamforming is formulated and resolved, which optimizes the sensing performance metric under the constraint of communication quality. Finally, numerical results substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed OPA-based OW-ISAC framework, while the tradeoff between communication and sensing performance metrics is also revealed.