Network-level ISAC: An Analytical Study of Antenna Topologies Ranging from Massive to Cell-Free MIMO

A cooperative architecture is proposed for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) networks, incorporating coordinated multi-point (CoMP) transmission along with multi-static sensing. We investigate how the allocation of antennas-to-base stations (BSs) affects cooperative sensing and cooperative communication performance. More explicitly, we balance the benefits of geographically concentrated antennas in the massive multiple input multiple output (MIMO) fashion, which enhance beamforming and coherent processing, against those of geographically distributed antennas towards cell-free transmission, which improve diversity and reduce service distances. Regarding sensing performance, we investigate three localization methods: angle-of-arrival (AOA)-based, time-of-flight (TOF)-based, and a hybrid approach combining both AOA and TOF measurements, for critically appraising their effects on ISAC network performance. Our analysis shows that in networks having N ISAC nodes following a Poisson point process, the localization accuracy of TOF-based methods follows a ln2 N scaling law (explicitly, the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) reduces with ln2 N). The AOA-based methods follow a ln N scaling law, while the hybrid methods scale as aln2 N + bln N, where a and b represent parameters related to TOF and AOA measurements, respectively. The difference between these scaling laws arises from the distinct ways in which measurement results are converted into the target location. Specifically, when converting AOA measurements to the target location, the localization error introduced during this conversion is inversely proportional to the distance between the BS and the target, leading to a more significant reduction in accuracy as the number of transceivers increases.