Rate-Distortion Tradeoff of Bistatic Integrated Sensing and Communication

The bistatic integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system avoids the strong self-interference in a monostatic ISAC system by employing a pair of physically separated sensing transceivers, and maintains the merit of co-designing radar sensing and communications on shared spectrum and hardware. Inspired by the appealing benefits of bistatic radar, in this paper, we study the bistatic ISAC, where a transmitter sends messages to a communication receiver and a sensing receiver at another location carries out a decoding-and-estimation (DnE) operation to obtain the state of the communication receiver. In terms of the degree of information decoding at the sensing receiver, we propose three DnE strategies, i.e., the blind estimation, the partial decoding-based estimation, and the full decoding-based estimation, and investigate the corresponding rate-distortion regions. A specific example is provided to illustrate the comparison on the rate-distortion regions of the three DnE strategies and the advantage of ISAC over independent communication and sensing.