Two Birds With One Stone: Enhancing Communication and Sensing via Multi-Functional RIS

TL;DR

This paper introduces multi-functional reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (MF-RISs) for 6G networks, enhancing both communication and sensing capabilities through novel architectures, schemes, and optimization strategies, with demonstrated performance improvements over traditional RISs.

Contribution

The paper presents the first integrated framework for using MF-RISs to simultaneously improve communication and sensing in 6G networks, including new schemes and optimization methods.

Findings

MF-RISs outperform conventional RISs in ISAC scenarios.

Proposed schemes enhance target detection accuracy.

Numerical results validate performance improvements.

Abstract

In this article, we propose new network architectures that integrate multi-functional reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (MF-RISs) into 6G networks to enhance both communication and sensing capabilities. Firstly, we elaborate how to leverage MF-RISs for improving communication performance in different communication modes including unicast, mulitcast, and broadcast and for different multi-access schemes. Next, we emphasize synergistic benefits of integrating MF-RISs with wireless sensing, enabling more accurate and efficient target detection in 6G networks. Furthermore, we present two schemes that utilize MF-RISs to enhance the performance of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC). We also study multi-objective optimization to achieve the optimal trade-off between communication and sensing performance. Finally, we present numerical results to show the performance improvements offered by MF-RISs compared to conventional RISs in ISAC. We also outline key research directions for MF-RIS under the ambition of 6G.