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Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) enables numerous innovative wireless applications. Communication-centric design is a practical choice for the construction of the sixth generation (6G) ISAC networks. Continuous-wave-based ISAC systems, with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) being a representative example, suffer from the self-interference (SI) problem, and hence are less suitable for long-range sensing. On the other hand, pulse-based half-duplex ISAC systems are free of SI, but are also less favourable for high-throughput communication scenarios. In this treatise, we propose MASked Modulation (MASM), a half-duplex ISAC waveform design scheme, which minimises a range blindness metric, referred to as "range glint", given a duty cycle (proportional to communication throughput) constraint. In particular, MASM is capable of supporting high-throughput communication (~50% duty cycle) under mild range glint. Moreover, MASM can be flexibly adapted to frame-level waveform designs by operating on the slow-time scale. In terms of optimal transmit mask design, a set of masks is shown to be ideal in the sense of sidelobe level and range glint intensity., Comment: Submitted to IEEE JSAC for possible publication

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) has emerged as a pivotal enabling technology for next-generation wireless networks. Despite the distinct signal design requirements of sensing and communication (S&C) systems, shifting the symbol-wise pulse shaping (SWiPS) framework from communication-only systems to ISAC poses significant challenges in signal design and processing This paper addresses these challenges by examining the ambiguity function (AF) of the SWiPS ISAC signal and introducing a novel pulse shaping design for single-carrier ISAC transmission. We formulate optimization problems to minimize the average integrated sidelobe level (ISL) of the AF, as well as the weighted ISL (WISL) while satisfying inter-symbol interference (ISI), out-of-band emission (OOBE), and power constraints. Our contributions include establishing the relationship between the AFs of both the random data symbols and signaling pulses, analyzing the statistical characteristics of the AF, and developing algorithmic frameworks for pulse shaping optimization using successive convex approximation (SCA) and alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) approaches. Numerical results are provided to validate our theoretical analysis, which demonstrate significant performance improvements in the proposed SWiPS design compared to the root-raised cosine (RRC) pulse shaping for conventional communication systems.

In this work, we consider a backscatter communication system wherein multiple asynchronous sources (tags) exploit the reverberation generated by a nearby radar transmitter as an ambient carrier to deliver a message to a common destination (reader) through a number of available subchannels. We propose a new encoding strategy wherein each tag transmits both pilot and data symbols on each subchannel and repeats some of the data symbols on multiple subchannels. We then exploit this signal structure to derive two semi-blind iterative algorithms for joint estimation of the data symbols and the subchannel responses that are also able to handle some missing measurements. The proposed encoding/decoding strategies are scalable with the number of tags and their payload and can achieve different tradeoffs in terms of transmission and error rates. Some numerical examples are provided to illustrate the merits of the proposed solutions., Comment: Submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications

In this paper, we propose a novel pulse shaping design for single-carrier integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) transmission. Due to the communication information embedded in the ISAC signal, the resulting auto-correlation function (ACF) is determined by both the information-conveying random symbol sequence and the signaling pulse, where the former leads to random fluctuations in the sidelobes of the ACF, impairing the range estimation performance. To overcome this challenge, we first analyze the statistical characteristics of the random ACF under the symbol-wise pulse shaping (SWPS) regime. As a step further, we formulate an optimization problem to design ISAC pulse shaping filters, which minimizes the average integrated sidelobe level ratio (ISLR) while meeting the Nyquist criterion, subject to power and bandwidth constraints. We then show that the problem can be recast as a convex quadratic program by expressing it in the frequency domain, which can be readily solved through standard tools. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed pulse shaping design achieves substantial ranging sidelobe reduction compared to the celebrated root-raised cosine (RRC) pulse shaping, given that the communication throughput is unchanged.

Colocated multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology has been widely used in automotive radars as it provides accurate angular estimation of the objects with relatively small number of transmitting and receiving antennas. Since the Direction Of Departure (DOD) and the Direction Of Arrival (DOA) of line-of-sight targets coincide, MIMO signal processing allows forming a larger virtual array for angle finding. However, multiple paths impinging the receiver is a major limiting factor, in that radar signals may bounce off obstacles, creating echoes for which the DOD does not equal the DOA. Thus, in complex scenarios with multiple scatterers, the direct paths of the intended targets may be corrupted by indirect paths from other objects, which leads to inaccurate angle estimation or ghost targets. In this paper, we focus on detecting the presence of ghosts due to multipath by regarding it as the problem of deciding between a composite hypothesis, H0 say, that the observations only contain an unknown number of direct paths sharing the same (unknown) DOD's and DOA's, and a composite alternative, H1 say, that the observations also contain an unknown number of indirect paths, for which DOD's and DOA's do not coincide. We exploit the Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test (GLRT) philosophy to determine the detector structure, wherein the unknown parameters are replaced by carefully designed estimators. The angles of both the active direct paths and of the multi-paths are indeed estimated through a sparsity-enforced Compressed Sensing (CS) approach with Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) optimization to estimate the angular parameters in the continuous domain. An extensive performance analysis is finally offered in order to validate the proposed solution., Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures; This paper has published in IEEE Transaction on Signal Processing

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) has been recognized as a key component in the envisioned 6G communication systems. Understanding the fundamental performance tradeoff between sensing and communication functionalities is essential for designing practical cost-efficient ISAC systems. In this paper, we aim for augmenting the current understanding of the deterministic-random tradeoff (DRT) between sensing and communication, by analyzing the sensing-optimal operating point of the fundamental capacity-distortion region. We show that the DRT exists for generic sensing performance metrics that are in general not convex/concave in the ISAC waveform. Especially, we elaborate on a representative non-convex performance metric, namely the detection probability for target detection tasks., Comment: 7 pages, 1+4 figures, submitted to ICASSP 2024

In this work, we exploit the radar clutter (i.e., the ensemble of echoes generated by the terrain and/or the surrounding objects in response to the signal emitted by a radar transmitter) as a carrier signal to enable an ambient backscatter communication from a source (tag) to a destination (reader). The proposed idea relies on the fact that, since the radar excitation is periodic, the radar clutter is itself periodic over time scales shorter than the coherence time of the environment. Upon deriving a convenient signal model, we propose two encoding/decoding schemes that do not require any coordination with the radar transmitter or knowledge of the radar waveform. Different tradeoffs in terms of transmission rate and error probability can be obtained upon changing the control signal driving the tag switch or the adopted encoding rule; also, multiple tags can be accommodated with either a sourced or an unsourced multiple access strategy. Some illustrative examples are provided., Comment: Accepted for pubblications in the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications

In this work we consider a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) dual-function radar-communication (DFRC) system, which senses multiple spatial directions and serves multiple users. Upon resorting to an orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) transmission format and a differential phase shift keying (DPSK) modulation, we study the design of the radiated waveforms and of the receive filters employed by the radar and the users. The approach is communication-centric, in the sense that a radar-oriented objective is optimized under constraints on the average transmit power, the power leakage towards specific directions, and the error rate of each user, thus safeguarding the communication quality of service (QoS). We adopt a unified design approach allowing a broad family of radar objectives, including both estimation- and detection-oriented merit functions. We devise a suboptimal solution based on alternating optimization of the involved variables, a convex restriction of the feasible search set, and minorization-maximization, offering a single algorithm for all of the radar merit functions in the considered family. Finally, the performance is inspected through numerical examples., Comment: This work has been submitted to the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications for possible publication

A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a nearly-passive flat layer made of inexpensive elements that can add a tunable phase shift to the impinging electromagnetic wave and are controlled by a low-power electronic circuit. This paper considers the fundamental problem of target detection in a RIS-aided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar. At first, a general signal model is introduced, which includes the possibility of using up to two RISs (one close to the radar transmitter and one close to the radar receiver) and subsumes both a monostatic and a bistatic radar configuration with or without a line-of-sight view of the prospective target. Upon resorting to a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT), the design of the phase shifts introduced by the RIS elements is formulated as the maximization of the probability of detection in the location under inspection for a fixed probability of false alarm, and suitable optimization algorithms are proposed. The performance analysis shows the benefits granted by the presence of the RISs and shed light on the interplay among the key system parameters, such as the radar-RIS distance, the RIS size, and location of the prospective target. A major finding is that the RISs should be better deployed in the near-field of the radar arrays at both the transmit and the receive side. The paper is concluded by discussing some open problems and foreseen applications., Comment: Paper submitted to IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing; revised version after first-round review

Energy efficiency, possibly coupled with cognition-based and spectrum-sharing architectures, is a key enabling technology for green communications in 5G-and-beyond standards. In this context, the present paper considers a multiple-input multiple-output communication system cooperatively coexisting with a surveillance radar: the objective function is the communication system energy efficiency, while radar operation is safeguarded by constraining the minimum received signal-to-disturbance ratio for a set of range-azimuth cells of the controlled scene, and no time synchronization between them is assumed. The degrees of freedom are the transmit powers of both systems, the space-time communication codebook and the linear filters at the radar receiver. The resulting optimization problem is non-convex, due to both the objective function and the presence of signal-dependent interference (clutter): we develop a block-coordinate-ascent approximate solution, and offer a thorough performance assessment, so as to elicit the merits of the proposed approach, along with the interplay among the achievable energy efficiency, the density of scatterers in the environment, and the size of the set of protected radar cells., Comment: Accepted (with minor changes) in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1907.07943

In this work, we consider the target detection problem in a sensing architecture where the radar is aided by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), that can be modeled as an array of sub-wavelength small reflective elements capable of imposing a tunable phase shift to the impinging waves and, ultimately, of providing the radar with an additional echo of the target. A theoretical analysis is carried out for closely- and widely-spaced (with respect to the target) radar and RIS and for different beampattern configurations, and some examples are provided to show that large gains can be achieved by the considered detection architecture., Comment: Accepted with Minor revisions on the IEEE Signal Processing Letters; updated version with supplementary material provided

Complex ADMM-Net, a complex-valued neural network architecture inspired by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM), is designed for interference removal in super-resolution stepped frequency radar angle-range-doppler imaging. Tailored to an uncooperative scenario wherein a MIMO radar shares spectrum with communications, the ADMM-Net recovers the radar image---which is assumed to be sparse---and simultaneously removes the communication interference, which is modeled as sparse in the frequency domain owing to spectrum underutilization. The scenario motivates an $\ell_1$-minimization problem whose ADMM iteration, in turn, undergirds the neural network design, yielding a set of generalized ADMM iterations that have learnable hyperparameters and operations. To train the network we use random data generated according to the radar and communication signal models. In numerical experiments ADMM-Net exhibits markedly lower error and computational cost than ADMM and CVX.

The paper considers a scenario where a base station (BS), equipped with a large-scale antenna array, execute, using the same frequency range, both communication with mobile users and radar surveillance of the surrounding environment, relying on the ability of the massive MIMO array to synthesize multiple narrow beams. Based on an OFDM signaling format for both communication and surveillance tasks, a lower bound to the system achievable downlink rate is provided, along with a GLRT detection rule that does not require any knowledge about the target parameters. Then, a power allocation strategy is proposed, aimed at maximizing the fairness across the mobile users, while guaranteeing a minimum signal to interference ratio threshold value for the radar system. Numerical results show that the system performs effectively, and that the power control procedure helps in improving the system fairness., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, paper presented at the 24th International ITG Workshop on Smart Antennas (WSA), 18-20 February 2020, Hamburg, Germany. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1912.00410

One of the trends that is gaining more and more importance in the field of beyond-5G and 6G wireless communication systems is the investigation on systems that jointly perform communication and sensing of the environment. This paper proposes to use a base station (BS), that we call \textit{radar-BS}, equipped with a large-scale antenna array to execute, using the same frequency range, communication with mobile users and sensing/surveillance of the surrounding environment through radar scanning. The massive antenna array can indeed both operate as a MIMO radar with co-located antennas -- transmitting radar signals pointing at positive elevation angles -- and perform signal-space beamforming to communicate with users mainly based on the ground. Our results show that using a massive MIMO radar-BS the communication and the radar system can coexist with little mutual interference., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, presented at 53th Asilomar conference, Nov. 2019

In this study, we consider a spectrum sharing architecture, wherein a multiple-input multiple-output communication system cooperatively coexists with a surveillance radar. The degrees of freedom for system design are the transmit powers of both systems, the receive linear filters used for pulse compression and interference mitigation at the radar receiver, and the space-time communication codebook. The design criterion is the maximization of the mutual information between the input and output symbols of the communication system, subject to constraints aimed at safeguarding the radar performance. Unlike previous studies, we do not require any time-synchronization between the two systems, and we guarantee the radar performance on all of the range-azimuth cells of the patrolled region under signal-dependent (endogenous) and signal-independent (exogenous) interference. This leads to a non-convex problem, and an approximate solution is thus introduced using a block coordinate ascent method. A thorough analysis is provided to show the merits of the proposed approach and emphasize the inherent tradeoff among the achievable mutual information, the density of scatterers in the environment, and the number of protected radar cells., Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transaction on Signal Processing on June 24, 2019

In this work, we exploit the sector level sweep of the IEEE 802.11ad communication standard to implement an opportunistic radar at mmWaves and derive an adaptive procedure for detecting multiple targets (echoes) and estimating their parameters. The proposed detector/estimator extracts the prospective echoes one-by-one from the received signal, after removing the interference caused by the previously detected (stronger) targets. Examples are provided to assess the system performance, also in comparison with the canonical matched-filter peak-detector and the Cram\'er-Rao bounds. Results indicate that the proposed method is robust against the signal spillover and the near-far problem caused by the imperfect auto-correlation of the probing signal and, for the same probability of false alarm, grants detection and localization performances close to those previously obtained in a simplified single-target scenario., Comment: Journal paper submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications on April 19, 2019

This paper considers the uplink of a massive MIMO communication system using 5G New Radio-compliant multiple access, which is to co-exist with a radar system using the same frequency band. A system model taking into account the reverberation (clutter) produced by the radar system onto the massive MIMO receiver is proposed. In this scenario, several receivers for uplink channel estimation and data detection are proposed, ranging from the simple channel-matched beamformer to the zero-forcing and linear minimum mean square error receivers for clutter disturbance rejection, under the two opposite situations of perfectly known ad completely unknown clutter covariance. A theoretical analysis is also given, deriving a lower bound on the achievable uplink spectral efficiency and the mutual information between the input Gaussian-encoded symbols and the observables available at the communication receiver of the cellular massive MIMO system: regarding the latter, in particular, we show that, in the large antenna number regime, the radar clutter effects at the base station is suppressed and single-user capacity is restored. Numerical results, illustrating the performance of the proposed detection schemes, confirm the findings of the theoretical analysis, and permit quantifying the system robustness to clutter effect for increasing number of antennas at the base station., Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures, paper accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1805.07796

Increased amounts of bandwidth are required to guarantee both high-quality/high-rate wireless services (4G and 5G) and reliable sensing capabilities such as automotive radar, air traffic control, earth geophysical monitoring and security applications. Therefore, co-existence between radar and communication systems using overlapping bandwidths has been a primary investigation field in recent years. Various signal processing techniques such as interference mitigation, pre-coding or spatial separation, and waveform design allow both radar and communications to share the spectrum. This article reviews recent work on co-existence between radar and communication systems, including signal models, waveform design and signal processing techniques. Our goal is to survey contributions in this area in order to provide a primary starting point for new researchers interested in these problems., Comment: Submitted to IEEE Signal Processing Magazine

In this paper we consider an un-cooperative spectrum sharing scenario, wherein a radar system is to be overlaid to a pre-existing wireless communication system. Given the order of magnitude of the transmitted powers in play, we focus on the issue of interference mitigation at the communication receiver. We explicitly account for the reverberation produced by the (typically high-power) radar transmitter whose signal hits scattering centers (whether targets or clutter) producing interference onto the communication receiver, which is assumed to operate in an un-synchronized and un-coordinated scenario. We first show that receiver design amounts to solving a non-convex problem of joint interference removal and data demodulation: next, we introduce two algorithms, both exploiting sparsity of a proper representation of the interference and of the vector containing the errors of the data block. The first algorithm is basically a relaxed constrained Atomic Norm minimization, while the latter relies on a two-stage processing structure and is based on alternating minimization. The merits of these algorithms are demonstrated through extensive simulations: interestingly, the two-stage alternating minimization algorithm turns out to achieve satisfactory performance with moderate computational complexity.

In this paper we consider the uplink of a massive MIMO communication system using 5G New Radio-compliant multiple access, which is to co-exist with a radar system using the same frequency band. We propose a system model taking into account the reverberation (clutter) produced by the radar system at the massive MIMO receiver. Then, we propose several linear receivers for uplink data-detection, ranging by the simple channel-matched beamformer to the zero-forcing and linear minimum mean square error receivers for clutter disturbance rejection. Our results show that the clutter may have a strong effect on the performance of the cellular communication system, but the use of large-scale antenna arrays at the base station is key to provide increased robustness against it, at least as far as data-detection is concerned., Comment: To be presented at 2018 IEEE SPAWC, Kalamata, Greece, June 2018

This paper proposes computationally efficient algorithms to maximize the energy efficiency in multi-carrier wireless interference networks, by a suitable allocation of the system radio resources, namely the transmit powers and subcarrier assignment. The problem is formulated as the maximization of the system Global Energy-Efficiency subject to both maximum power and minimum rate constraints. This leads to a challenging non-convex fractional problem, which is tackled through an interplay of fractional programming, learning, and game theory. The proposed algorithmic framework is provably convergent and has a complexity linear in both the number of users and subcarriers, whereas other available solutions can only guarantee a polynomial complexity in the number of users and subcarriers. Numerical results show that the proposed method performs similarly as other, more complex, algorithms.

Most existing approaches to co-existing communication/radar systems assume that the radar and communication systems are coordinated, i.e., they share information, such as relative position, transmitted waveforms and channel state. In this paper, we consider an un-coordinated scenario where a communication receiver is to operate in the presence of a number of radars, of which only a sub-set may be active, which poses the problem of estimating the active waveforms and the relevant parameters thereof, so as to cancel them prior to demodulation. Two algorithms are proposed for such a joint waveform estimation/data demodulation problem, both exploiting sparsity of a proper representation of the interference and of the vector containing the errors of the data block, so as to implement an iterative joint interference removal/data demodulation process. The former algorithm is based on classical on-grid compressed sensing (CS), while the latter forces an atomic norm (AN) constraint: in both cases the radar parameters and the communication demodulation errors can be estimated by solving a convex problem. We also propose a way to improve the efficiency of the AN-based algorithm. The performance of these algorithms are demonstrated through extensive simulations, taking into account a variety of conditions concerning both the interferers and the respective channel states.

The focus of this paper is on co-existence between a communication system and a pulsed radar sharing the same bandwidth. Based on the fact that the interference generated by the radar onto the communication receiver is intermittent and depends on the density of scattering objects (such as, e.g., targets), we first show that the communication system is equivalent to a set of independent parallel channels, whereby pre-coding on each channel can be introduced as a new degree of freedom. We introduce a new figure of merit, named the {\em compound rate}, which is a convex combination of rates with and without interference, to be optimized under constraints concerning the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (including {\em signal-dependent} interference due to clutter) experienced by the radar and obviously the powers emitted by the two systems: the degrees of freedom are the radar waveform and the afore-mentioned encoding matrix for the communication symbols. We provide closed-form solutions for the optimum transmit policies for both systems under two basic models for the scattering produced by the radar onto the communication receiver, and account for possible correlation of the signal-independent fraction of the interference impinging on the radar. We also discuss the region of the achievable communication rates with and without interference. A thorough performance assessment shows the potentials and the limitations of the proposed co-existing architecture.