Energy-Efficient Hybrid Beamforming with Dynamic On-Off Control for Integrated Sensing, Communications, and Powering

This paper investigates the energy-efficient hybrid beamforming design for a multi-functional integrated sensing, communications, and powering (ISCAP) system. In this system, a base station (BS) with a hybrid analog-digital (HAD) architecture sends unified wireless signals to communicate with multiple information receivers (IRs), sense multiple point targets, and wirelessly charge multiple energy receivers (ERs) at the same time. To facilitate the energy-efficient design, we present a novel HAD architecture for the BS transmitter, which allows dynamic on-off control of its radio frequency (RF) chains and analog phase shifters (PSs) through a switch network. We also consider a practical and comprehensive power consumption model for the BS, by taking into account the power-dependent non-linear power amplifier (PA) efficiency, and the on-off non-transmission power consumption model of RF chains and PSs. We jointly design the hybrid beamforming and dynamic on-off control at the BS, aiming to minimize its total power consumption, while guaranteeing the performance requirements on communication rates, sensing Cramér-Rao bound (CRB), and harvested power levels. The formulation also takes into consideration the per-antenna transmit power constraint and the constant modulus constraints for the analog beamformer at the BS. The resulting optimization problem for ISCAP is highly non-convex due to the binary on-off non-transmission power consumption of RF chains and PSs, the non-linear PA efficiency, and the coupling between analog and digital beamformers. To tackle this problem, we first approximate the binary on-off non-transmission power consumption into a continuous form, and accordingly propose an iterative algorithm to find a high-quality approximate solution with ensured convergence, by employing techniques from alternating optimization (AO), sequential convex approximation (SCA), and semi-definite relaxation (SDR). Then, based on the optimized beamforming weights, we develop an efficient method to determine the binary on-off control of RF chains and PSs, as well as the associated hybrid beamforming solution. Numerical results show that the proposed design achieves an improved energy efficiency for ISCAP than other benchmark schemes without joint design of hybrid beamforming and dynamic on-off control. This validates the benefit of dynamic on-off control in energy reduction, especially when the multi-functional performance requirements become less stringent. © 2024 IEEE.