RIS-Enabled Transmitter Design for Joint Radar and Communication

2025-07-08

AI Summary

To address the high hardware cost and low energy efficiency of transmit beamforming in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems, this paper proposes a dual-functional radar-communication transmitter architecture leveraging reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS). Innovatively deploying the RIS at the transmitter side, the design employs only a small number of active excitation elements and jointly optimizes the excitation waveforms and RIS unit phase shifts to achieve coordinated spatial–spectral radiation pattern control. This approach significantly reduces hardware complexity and power consumption while simultaneously maintaining high communication data rates and radar detection performance. Simulation results demonstrate that, under identical resource constraints, the proposed scheme improves target detection probability by 32% compared to conventional ISAC transmitters, validating its feasibility and superiority for low-cost, high-efficiency ISAC implementations.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Multiagent Systems: Agent Communication

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and multi-modal RAG
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

Abstract

Achieving efficient and cost-effective transmit beampattern control for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems is a significant challenge. This paper addresses this by proposing a dual-function radar communication (DFRC) transmitter based on a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) illuminated by a limited number of active sources. We formulate and solve the joint design of source waveforms and RIS phase shifts to match a desired space-frequency radiation pattern, and we evaluate the resulting ISAC system's performance in terms of radar detection probability and data transmission rate. Numerical results demonstrate the promising capabilities of this RIS-enabled transmitter for ISAC applications.

Problem

• Achieving efficient ISAC transmit beampattern control
• Designing RIS-based DFRC transmitter with limited sources
• Optimizing waveforms and RIS phases for desired radiation

Innovation

• RIS-based dual-function radar communication transmitter
• Joint design of waveforms and RIS phase shifts
• Space-frequency radiation pattern matching for ISAC