Cell-Free Joint Sensing and Communication MIMO: A Max-Min Fair Beamforming Approach

This paper considers a cell-free integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) MIMO system, where distributed MIMO access points are jointly serving the communication users and sensing the targets. For this setup, we first develop two baseline approaches that separately design the sensing and communication beamforming vectors, namely communication-prioritized sensing beamforming and sensing-prioritized communication beamforming. Then, we consider the joint sensing and communication (JSC) beamforming design and derive the optimal structure of these JSC beamforming vectors based on a max-min fairness formulation. The results show that the developed JSC beamforming is capable of achieving nearly the same communication signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) that of the communication-prioritized sensing beamforming solutions with almost the same sensing SNR of the sensing-prioritized communication beamforming approaches, yielding a promising strategy for cell-free ISAC MIMO systems.