IRS-Based Integrated Location Sensing and Communication for mmWave SIMO Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes an IRS-based integrated sensing and communication system for mmWave SIMO setups, enabling simultaneous location sensing and data transmission with millimeter-level accuracy and efficient beamforming.

Contribution

It introduces a novel IRS-based ISAC framework with a detailed protocol, including location sensing, beamforming optimization, and resource sharing, demonstrating high positioning accuracy and near-perfect beamforming performance.

Findings

Achieves millimeter-level user positioning accuracy.

Beamforming schemes based on estimated location perform comparably to perfect CSI schemes.

Validates the effectiveness of the proposed IRS-based ISAC system through simulations.

Abstract

In this paper, we establish an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system based on a distributed semi-passive intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), which allows location sensing and data transmission to be carried out simultaneously, sharing the same frequency and time resources. The detailed working process of the proposed IRS-based ISAC system is designed, including the transmission protocol, location sensing and beamforming optimization. Specifically, each coherence block consists of two periods, the ISAC period with two time blocks and the pure communication (PC) period. During each time block of the ISAC period, data transmission and user positioning are carried out simultaneously. The estimated user location in the first time block will be used for beamforming design in the second time block. During the PC period, only data transmission is conducted, by invoking the user location estimated in the second time block of the ISAC period for beamforming design. {\color{black}Simulation results show that a millimeter-level positioning accuracy can be achieved by the proposed location sensing scheme, demonstrating the advantage of the proposed IRS-based ISAC framework. Besides, the proposed two beamforming schemes based on the estimated location information achieve similar performance to the benchmark schemes assuming perfect channel state information (CSI), which verifies the effectiveness of beamforming design using sensed location information.