Net-Zero Energy Dual-Functional Radar-Communication Systems

This paper proposes beamforming designs for net-zero energy multi-input multi-output (MIMO) dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) systems that are powered through energy harvesting (EH) resources and aim to operate autonomously without access to the power grid. We propose a weighted optimization problem to jointly maximize the radar mutual information and minimum quality of service (QoS) requested by communication users subject to energy balancing constraints. The proposed problem is not convex, hence it is tough to solve. We exploit semidefinite relaxation (SDR) and first-order Taylor expansion techniques to relax its non-convexity issues. We then propose an iterative algorithm to obtain the beamforming matrices for the reference scenario when full channel state information (CSI) and energy arrival information (EAI) are available. For the single-target scenario, we show that the proposed optimization contains rank-one solutions. For the multiple targets scenario, by adding auxiliary optimization variables, we show that rank-one matrices can be achieved from the optimal solutions of the proposed optimization. We then propose a robust optimization for the case where only imperfect CSI and EAI are assumed to be known. Finally, numerical simulations show that the proposed DFRC designs are convergent and obtain a graceful trade-off between the radar and communication performances.