Active RIS Aided Integrated Sensing and Communication Systems

This paper considers an active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system. We aim to maximize Radar signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) by jointly optimizing the beamforming matrix at the dual-function Radar-communication (DFRC) base station (BS) and the reflecting coefficient matrix at the active RIS subject to the quality of service (QoS) constraint of communication users (UE) and the transmit power constraints of active RIS and DFRC BS. In the proposed scenario, we mainly focus on the four-hop BS-RIS-target-RIS-BS sensing link, and the direct BS-target-BS link is assumed to be blocked. Due to the coupling of the beamforming matrix and the reflecting coefficient matrix, we use the alternating optimization (AO) method to solve the problem. Given reflecting coefficients, we apply majorization-minimization (MM) and semidefinite programming (SDP) methods to deal with the nonconvex QoS constraints and Radar SINR objective functions. An initialization method is proposed to obtain a high-quality converged solution, and a sufficient condition of the feasibility of the original problem is provided. Since the signal for sensing is reflected twice at the same active RIS panel, the Radar SINR and active RIS transmit power are quartic functions of RIS coefficients after using the MM algorithm. We then transform the problem into a sum of square (SOS) form, and a semidefinite relaxation (SDR)-based algorithm is developed to solve the problem. Finally, simulation results validate the potential of active RIS in enhancing the performance of the ISAC system compared to the passive RIS, and indicate that the transmit power and physical location of the active RIS should be carefully chosen.