Access Management in Joint Sensing and Communication Systems: Efficiency Versus Fairness

In this paper, we consider a distributed joint sensing and communication (DJSC) system in which each radar sensor as a JSC node is equipped with a sensing function and a communication function. Deploying multiple JSC nodes may require a large amount of bandwidth. Therefore, we investigate the bandwidth allocation problem for the DJSC system. In particular, we aim to optimize the bandwidth allocation to the sensing function and the communication function of the JSC nodes. To improve the allocation efficiency while benefiting the spatial diversity advantage of the DJSC systems, the objective is to maximize the sum of sensing performances, i.e., estimation rates, communication performances, i.e., communication data rates, and fairness of all the users. The optimization problem is non-convex and difficult to be solved. For this, we propose a fully polynomial time approximation algorithm, and we prove that the approximation algorithm can guarantee a near-optimal solution with an accuracy bound of epsilon;. Furthermore, we propose to use a heuristic algorithm with lower complexity. The simulation results show that both the proposed algorithms are able to achieve the solutions close to the optimum in a computationally efficient fashion.