Movable Antenna for Integrated Sensing and Communication in Air Sea Ground Networks

Ahmed A. Al-habob, Octavia A. Dobre, Yindi Jing

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is a new paradigm for efficiently combining sensing and communication functionalities by leveraging shared hardware and radio resources. Despite its promise, ISAC yields conflicting beamforming goals and competition over the same resources. Movable antennas enable effective exploitation of spatial degrees of freedom through dynamic position/orientation control, thereby enhancing the performance of ISAC systems. This paper proposes a movable antenna framework for ISAC in air sea ground networks. A multi-objective optimization problem is formulated with the objectives of maximizing the communication rate of a set of aerial, sea, and ground devices and the sensing rate of a set of targets. The location and orientation of the antenna sub-arrays, as well as the transmit/receive beamforming, are optimized under practical constraints on the movable antennas' location and orientation. A solution is developed based on a $K$-means clustering approach to optimize the sub-arrays' orientation and a particle swarm optimization to place the sub-arrays in optimized locations. The transmit and receive beamforming are designed using a successive convex approximation and a generalized eigenvector method, respectively. Simulation results illustrate that the developed movable antenna framework improves the ISAC objective and provides a remarkable trade-off between the communication data rate and the targets' sensing rate when compared with the conventional stationary antenna array scenario.