Rate-Distortion Tradeoff of Bistatic Integrated Sensing and Communication

Bistatic Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) systems circumvent the issue of strong self-interference present in monostatic ISAC systems by employing a pair of physically separated sensing transceivers. They maintain the advantage of co-designing radar sensing and communications on shared spectrum and hardware. Motivated by the favorable attributes of bistatic radar, this paper investigates bistatic ISAC. In this setup, a transmitter sends messages to a communication receiver, while a sensing receiver at another location conducts a 'decoding-and-estimation' (DnE) operation to obtain the state of the communication receiver. We propose three achievable DnE strategies based on the degree of information decoding at the sensing receiver: blind estimation, partial decoding-based estimation, and full decoding-based estimation. We explore the corresponding rate-distortion regions associated with each strategy. Furthermore, we provide a specific example to illustrate the comparison of the rate-distortion regions among the three DnE strategies and demonstrate the advantage of ISAC over independent communication and sensing.