Networked integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has gained significant attention as a promising technology for enabling next-generation wireless systems. To further enhance networked ISAC, delegating the reception of sensing signals to dedicated target monitoring terminals (TMTs) instead of base stations (BSs) offers significant advantages in terms of sensing capability and deployment flexibility. Despite its potential, the coordinated beamforming design for networked integrated communication and time-of-arrival (ToA)-based multi-TMT localization remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study to fill this gap. Specifically, we first establish signal models for both communication and localization, and, for the first time, derive a closed-form Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) to characterize the localization performance. Subsequently, we exploit this CRLB to formulate two optimization problems, focusing on sensing-centric and communication-centric criteria, respectively. For the sensing-centric problem, we develop a globally optimal algorithm based on semidefinite relaxation (SDR) when each BS is equipped with more antennas than the total number of communication users. While for the communication-centric problem, we design a globally optimal algorithm for the single-BS case using bisection search. For the general case of both problems, we propose a unified successive convex approximation (SCA)-based algorithm, which is suboptimal yet efficient, and further extend it from single-target scenarios to more practical multi-target scenarios. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms, reveal the intrinsic performance trade-offs between communication and localization, and further show that deploying more TMTs is always preferable to deploying more BSs in networked ISAC systems.
Xia et al. (Mon,) studied this question.