Power Allocation for OFDM-Based Free Space Optical Integrated Sensing and Communication

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is one of the six usage scenarios of the sixth generation (6G) mobile communication system. Since an optical system can also provide communication and sensing abilities, optical ISAC has become a potential complement to radio-frequency (RF) ISAC. As orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) has gained increasing interest in optical systems, we propose a direct-current-biased optical OFDM (DCO-OFDM) scheme for free space optical (FSO) ISAC in this paper. To derive the spectral efficiency for communication and the Fisher information for sensing, we model the clipping noise of DCO-OFDM with the Bussgang theorem to obtain the expression of the signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, based on the derived performance metrics, an optimization problem for power allocation is formulated, and an iterative algorithm is proposed to solve the problem efficiently. Meanwhile, numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and reveal the trade-off between communication and sensing functionalities of the OFDM-based FSO-ISAC system.