Hybrid Beamforming Design and Signal Processing with Fully-Connected Architecture for mmWave Integrated Sensing and Communications

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) is capable of achieving gigabit/second communication capacity and centimeter-level sensing accuracy and has become one of the main frequency bands for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) research. Hybrid beamforming techniques have attracted much attention for solving the high path loss of mmWave and further reducing the hardware cost of the system. However, the related studies based on multicarrier and fully-connected hybrid architectures are still limited. For this reason, this paper investigates the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based mmWave fully-connected hybrid architecture ISAC system to form a stable communication beam and dynamically varying sensing beam. In order to realize the aforementioned multifunctional beams, the hybrid beamformer design problem based on weighted error minimization of multicarrier is proposed and solved efficiently using the penalty dual decomposition (PDD) algorithm. Meanwhile, based on the echo model, the multicarrier multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm for target angle of arrival estimation and the two-dimensional discrete Fourier transform (2D-DFT) algorithm for distance and velocity estimation are proposed, respectively. Numerical simulation results show that by adjusting the weighting factor, a flexible trade-off can be formed between the communication spectrum efficiency and the sensing accuracy error.