Near-Field Integrated Sensing and Communications

• Published in: IEEE communications letters Vol. 27; no. 8; pp. 2048 - 2052
• Main Authors: Wang, Zhaolin, Mu, Xidong, Liu, Yuanwei
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.08.2023; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Antennas; Channel estimation; Channel models; Cramer-Rao bounds; Far fields; Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC); joint distance and angle estimation; Near fields; near-field; Optimization; Sensors; Symbols; Waveforms; Wireless sensor networks
• ISSN: 1089-7798; 1558-2558
• DOI: 10.1109/LCOMM.2023.3280132

A near-field integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) framework is proposed, which introduces an additional distance dimension for both sensing and communications compared to the conventional far-field system. In particular, the Cramér-Rao bound for the near-field joint distance and angle sensing is derived, which is minimized subject to the minimum communication rate requirement of each user. Both fully digital antennas and hybrid digital and analog antennas are investigated. For fully digital antennas, a globally optimal solution of the ISAC waveform is obtained via semidefinite relaxation. For hybrid antennas, a high-quality solution is obtained through two-stage optimization. Numerical results demonstrate the performance gain introduced by the additional distance dimension of the near-field ISAC over the far-field ISAC.