CRLB-Driven Beamforming and Power Allocation for Multi-BS Cooperative ISAC Networks

This paper presents a Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB)-driven beamforming (BF) and power allocation (PA) framework for cooperative integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) networks, where a set of multi-antenna base stations (BSs) jointly serve multiple users and simultaneously perform multi-static target estimation. In our design, we investigate how the position error bound (PEB) and velocity error bound (VEB) can be exploited and incorporated into BF and PA optimization. The design leveraging PEB and VEB as metrics directly characterizes sensing accuracy. First, we propose a semidefinite programming (SDP)-based BF, where the PEB and VEB constraints are handled by double Schur complements, and the rank-1 constraints of the BF covariance matrices are relaxed by semidefinite relaxation (SDR), whose tightness is proved using the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. Addressing the complexity, we further develop a two-stage PA algorithm, where the communication and sensing beams are formed by the regularized zero-forcing (RZF) and null-space projection (NSP) methods, respectively, and the communication and sensing PAs are solved sequentially by second-order cone programming (SOCP). Although the PA algorithm sacrifices the degrees of freedom, its performance shows a slight gap compared to BF in the simulation, while the execution time of around 25 ms demonstrates its applicability in dynamic environments.