Scheduling in Cooperative ICAL Networks Under Imperfect CSI

The cooperative integrated communication and localization (ICAL) has attracted great interest, since the transmission/reception points (TRPs) can collaborate with each other to reap the cooperation gains in both communication and localization. However, the cross-link interference between communication and localization could degrade the system performance. To fully obtain the performance gains, this paper proposes a robust scheduling strategy for cooperative ICAL networks that accounts for practical imperfections in channel state information (CSI) and clock synchronization. Specifically, the TRPs adopt non-coherent transmission to relax the requirement for tight synchronization, while utilizing minimum mean square error (MMSE) precoding to reduce the cross-link interference. To ensure the fairness among multiple users, we formulate a joint TRP selection and power control problem aimed at maximizing the minimum spectral efficiency experienced by a user, subject to the localization posterior Cram$\acute{\text{e}}$r-Rao bound (PCRB) constraint for both the single-target and multi-target scenarios. The quadratic fractional transform, successive convex approximation and block coordinate descent methods are proposed to solve the non-convex optimization problem. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed scheduling scheme.