ISAC Meets SWIPT: Multi-functional Wireless Systems Integrating Sensing, Communication, and Powering

This paper unifies integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) and simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), by investigating a new multi-functional multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system integrating wireless sensing, communication, and powering. In this system, one multi-antenna hybrid access point (H-AP) transmits wireless signals to communicate with one multi-antenna information decoding (ID) receiver, wirelessly charge one multi-antenna energy harvesting (EH) receiver, and perform radar target sensing based on the echo signal at the same time. Under this setup, we aim to reveal the fundamental performance tradeoff limits among sensing, communication, and powering, in terms of the estimation Cramer-Rao bound (CRB), achievable communication rate, and harvested energy level, respectively. In particular, we consider two different target models for radar sensing, namely the point and extended targets, for which we are interested in estimating the target angle and the complete target response matrix, respectively. For both models, we define the achievable CRB-rate-energy (C-R-E) region and characterize its Pareto boundary by maximizing the achievable rate at the ID receiver, subject to the estimation CRB requirement for target sensing, the harvested energy requirement at the EH receiver, and the maximum transmit power constraint at the H-AP. We obtain the well-structured optimal transmit covariance solutions to the two formulated problems by applying advanced convex optimization techniques. Numerical results show the optimal C-R-E region boundary achieved by our proposed design, as compared to the benchmark schemes based on time switching and eigenmode transmission (EMT).