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Abstract:Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) enables sensing and communication (S&C) functionalities to share spectrum, hardware, and signal-processing resources, but the resulting inter-functionality interference creates a fundamental receiver-design challenge in uplink operation. To this end, rate-splitting (RS)-inspired ISAC has been proposed as a flexible approach to inter-functionality interference management, whereby communication interference during sensing is partially decoded and cancelled and partially treated as noise. In this work, we characterize the Pareto-optimal communication-rate (CR)-sensing-rate (SR) rate region of RS-inspired uplink ISAC by jointly optimizing the sensing illumination and communication-message split. Closed-form CR and SR expressions are derived while accounting for residual sensing-echo interference caused by target-response estimation uncertainty. We analytically prove that the resulting RS-inspired region contains the non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-inspired endpoint-order time-sharing region. We further show that, under fixed sensing illumination, residual sensing-echo interference can break the containment of the orthogonal multiple access (OMA)-inspired region by both the RS- and NOMA-inspired regions. Joint sensing-illumination optimization enlarges these non-orthogonal achievable regions and recovers the maximum CR at the zero-SR endpoint. High-signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and near-field large-array analyses characterize the asymptotic behaviour, and numerical results validate the analysis under both near- and far-field propagation. This is the first work to characterize the Pareto-optimal rate region of RS-inspired uplink ISAC.

Submission history

From: Anup Mishra [view email]
[v1] Fri, 5 Jun 2026 09:36:43 UTC (487 KB)
[v2] Wed, 2 Sep 2026 18:01:53 UTC (773 KB)