Joint Subcarrier Assignment and Power Allocation Strategy for Integrated Radar and Communications System Based on Power Minimization

This paper investigates the problem of power minimization-based joint subcarrier assignment and power allocation (PM-JSAPA) for an integrated radar and communications system (IRCS). In the considered system, the integrated transmitter is responsible to fulfill both radar and communications purposes simultaneously. The proposed PM-JSAPA strategy aims to minimize the total radiated power of the IRCS by jointly optimizing the available subcarriers and power resource allocation in order to achieve improved power-saving performance, subject to a predetermined mutual information (MI) for target parameter estimation and a specified data information rate (DIR) for wireless communications. The formulated problem falls into a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problem, which is generally NP-hard. Then, an efficient three-step resource allocation framework is designed to solve the resulting optimization problem. Specifically, in Step 1, the subcarrier assignment for both radar and communications purposes is determined. In Step 2 and Step 3, we perform power allocation for different applications with the obtained subcarrier assignment results in Step 1, respectively. Finally, numerical simulation results are presented to demonstrate the superior power-saving performance of the proposed PM-JSAPA strategy and the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.