Beamforming has great potential for joint communication and sensing (JCAS), which is becoming a demanding feature on many emerging platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles and smart cars. Although beamforming has been extensively studied for communication and radar sensing respectively, its application in the joint system is not straightforward due to different beamforming requirements by communication and sensing. In this paper, we propose a novel multibeam framework using steerable analog antenna arrays, which allows seamless integration of communication and sensing. Different to conventional JCAS schemes that support JCAS using a single beam, our framework is based on the key innovation of multibeam technology: providing fixed subbeam for communication and packet-varying scanning subbeam for sensing, simultaneously from a single transmitting array. We provide a system architecture and protocols for the proposed framework, complying well with modern packet communication systems with multicarrier modulation. We also propose low-complexity and effective multibeam design and generation methods, which offer great flexibility in meeting different communication and sensing requirements. We further develop sensing parameter estimation algorithms using conventional digital Fourier transform and 1D compressive sensing techniques, matching well with the multibeam framework. Simulation results are provided and validate the effectiveness of our proposed framework, beamforming design methods and the sensing algorithms.
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