Optical Integrated Sensing and Communication: Architectures, Potentials and Challenges

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is viewed as a crucial component of future mobile networks and has gained much interest in both academia and industry. Similar to the emergence of radio-frequency (RF) ISAC, the integration of free space optical communication and optical sensing yields optical ISAC (O-ISAC), which is regarded as a powerful complement to its RF counterpart. In this article, we first introduce the generalized system structure of O-ISAC, and then elaborate on three advantages of O-ISAC, i.e., increasing communication rate, enhancing sensing precision, and reducing interference. Next, waveform design and resource allocation of O-ISAC are discussed based on pulse waveform, constant-modulus waveform, and multi-carrier waveform. Furthermore, we put forward future trends and challenges of O-ISAC, which are expected to provide some valuable directions for future research.

Free Space Optical Integrated Sensing and Communication Based on DCO-OFDM: Performance Metrics and Resource Allocation

As one of the six usage scenarios of the sixth generation (6G) mobile communication system, integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has garnered considerable attention, and numerous studies have been conducted on radio-frequency (RF)-ISAC. Benefitting from the communication and sensing capabilities of an optical system, free space optical (FSO)-ISAC becomes a potential complement to RF-ISAC. In this paper, a direct-current-biased optical orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (DCO-OFDM) scheme is proposed for FSO-ISAC. To derive the spectral efficiency for communication and the Fisher information for sensing as performance metrics, we model the clipping noise of DCO-OFDM as additive colored Gaussian noise to obtain the expression of the signal-to-noise ratio. Based on the derived performance metrics, joint power allocation problems are formulated for both communication-centric and sensing-centric scenarios. In addition, the non-convex joint optimization problems are decomposed into sub-problems for DC bias and subcarriers, which can be solved by block coordinate descent algorithms. Furthermore, numerical simulations demonstrate the proposed algorithms and reveal the trade-off between communication and sensing functionalities of the OFDM-based FSO-ISAC system.