Beamforming design for joint localization and data transmission in distributed antenna systems

A distributed antenna system is studied whose goal is providing both data communication and positioning function-alities to mobile stations (MSs). Applications include cellular systems and tactical networks. Each MS receives data from the base stations (BSs), and uses the received signals not only to extract information but also to determine its location via time of arrival (TOA) measurements. The problem of minimizing the power expenditure of the entire network under data throughput and localization accuracy requirements is formulated with respect to the beamforming vectors used at the BSs. A solution is proposed based on rank-relaxation whose performance is evaluated via numerical results.