Tiled Subarray Design for Multibeam Joint Communication and Sensing

The multibeam technology is a promising solution for joint communication and sensing (JCAS) in a base station (BS). Tiling of apertures with rectangular, hexagonal, and circular boundaries is studied which improves cost-efficiency, modularity, and scalability of the design. The optimization of tiling configuration considers the matching of the communication channel and the ambiguity function of sensing before and after tiling. The performance metrics are the capacity for communication and the maximum side lobe level (MSLL)s of the array radiation pattern for sensing. The numerical results show that the tiling of various apertures with 64 antennas does not influence the capacity of communication largely. Only-communication, only-sensing, and JCAS apertures are compared in regard to the MSLL, where the aperture for only-sensing has the lowest MSLL without deteriorating the capacity of communication. The metrics show the tiled aperture with a hexagonal boundary has the best JCAS performance.