Integrated Sensing and Communications With Joint Beam-Squint and Beam-Split for mmWave/THz Massive MIMO

Abstract

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) has attracted tremendous attention for the future 6G wireless communications systems. To improve the transmission rates and sensing accuracy, massive multi-input multi-output (MIMO) technique is leveraged with large transmission bandwidth in millimeter wave (mmWave)/terahertz (THz) band. However, the growing size of antenna array and transmission bandwidth results in the beam-squint effect, which hampers the performance of communications. Moreover, the time overhead of the traditional sensing algorithm is prohibitively high for practical systems. In this paper, instead of alleviating the beam-squint effect, we take advantage of joint beam-squint and beam-split effect and propose a novel integrated sensing and communications scheme for massive MIMO system. Specifically, with the beam-squint effect, the base station (BS) utilizes the true-time-delay (TTD) lines to steer the beams of different OFDM subcarriers towards distributive directions simultaneously. Different users then feedback their respective subcarrier frequency with the maximum array gain to BS, based on which BS could calculate the directions of the users. Moreover, by selecting sub-array with the inter-antenna spacing larger than half-wavelength, the beam-split effect can be introduced and exploited to expand the sensing range. The proposed sensing method operates over frequency-domain, and the intended sensing range is covered by all the subcarriers simultaneously, which significantly reduces the time overhead compared to the conventional sensing scheme. Simulation results have demonstrated the effectiveness as well as the superior performance of the proposed ISAC scheme.