Waveform Design for OFDM-Based ISAC Systems Under Resource Occupancy Constraint

Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) is one of the key pillars envisioned for 6G wireless systems. ISAC systems combine communication and sensing functionalities over a single waveform, with full resource sharing. In particular, waveform design for legacy Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) systems consists of a suitable time-frequency resource allocation policy balancing between communication and sensing performance. Over time and/or frequency, having unused resources leads to an ambiguity function with high sidelobes that significantly affect the performance of ISAC for OFDM waveforms. This paper proposes an OFDM-based ISAC waveform design that takes into account communication and resource occupancy constraints. The proposed method minimizes the Cramér-Rao Bound (CRB) on delay and Doppler estimation for two closely spaced targets. Moreover, the paper addresses the under-sampling issue by interpolating the estimated sensing channel based on matrix completion via Schatten p-norm approximation. Numerical results show that the proposed waveform outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.