Hierarchical Functionality Prioritization in Multicast ISAC: Optimal Admission Control and Discrete-Phase Beamforming

We investigate the joint admission control and discrete-phase multicast beamforming design for integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) systems, where sensing and communications functionalities have different hierarchies. Specifically, the ISAC system first allocates resources to the higher-hierarchy functionality and opportunistically uses the remaining resources to support the lower-hierarchy one. This resource allocation problem is a nonconvex mixed-integer nonlinear program (MINLP). We propose an exact mixed-integer linear program (MILP) reformulation, leading to a globally optimal solution. In addition, we implemented three baselines for comparison, which our proposed method outperforms by more than 39%.