Optimal Scheduling Policy for Time-Sharing Joint Radar and Communication Systems

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has been treated as a key technology for providing high-quality performance on both communication and sensing with higher spectrum efficiency and lower hardware cost. Among the research on ISAC, joint Radar and communication (JRC) is one of the typical scenarios. In this paper, we focus on designing the optimal JRC scheduling policy and characterizing the optimal tradeoff between the performance of communication and detection in a time-sharing JRC system. To this end, an optimization problem of minimizing the average delay with the constraints on the average power and detection probability is proposed. With the help of the constrained Markov Decision Process (CMDP) and linear programming (LP), the optimal cross-layer JRC scheduling policy is presented, which also reveals the optimal tradeoff between the performance of the communication and sensing in this JRC system. Moreover, we demonstrate the condition for detection scheduling not occupying the time resources ought to be allocated to send data in the communication-centric system. When this condition holds, we call this JRC system achieves ‘sensing for free’. For the JRC system with this property, the complexity of scheduling design can be reduced while the time resources can be utilized more efficiently.