Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computation Over-the-Air: MIMO Beamforming Design

To support the unprecedented growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications, tremendous data need to be collected by the IoT devices and delivered to the server for further computation. By utilizing the same signals for both radar sensing and data communication, the integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technique has broken the barriers between data collection and delivery in the physical layer. By exploiting the analog-wave addition in a multi-access channel, over-the-air computation (AirComp) enables function computation via transmissions in the physical layer. The promising performance of ISAC and AirComp motivates the current work on developing a framework called integrated sensing, communication, and computation over-the-air (ISCCO). The performance metrics of radar sensing and AirComp are evaluated by the mean squared errors of the estimated target response matrix and the received computation results, respectively. The design challenge of MIMO ISCCO lies in the joint optimization of beamformers for sensing, communication, and computation at both the IoT devices and the server, which results in a non-convex problem. To solve this problem, an algorithmic solution based on the technique of semidefinite relaxation is proposed. The use case of target location estimation based on ISCCO is demonstrated in simulation to show the performance superiority.