An Overview on IRS-Enabled Sensing and Communications for 6G: Architectures, Fundamental Limits, and Joint Beamforming Designs

TL;DR

This paper reviews IRS-enabled sensing and communication architectures for 6G, analyzing fundamental limits, joint beamforming strategies, and multi-IRS networks to enhance sensing and communication performance.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of IRS-enabled sensing and communication architectures, including novel joint beamforming designs and analysis of fundamental performance limits for 6G networks.

Findings

Comparison of passive, semi-passive, and active IRS sensing architectures.

Joint transmit and reflective beamforming strategies for ISAC.

Discussion of multi-IRS networked ISAC and future research directions.

Abstract

This paper presents an overview on intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-enabled sensing and communication for the forthcoming sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks, in which IRSs are strategically deployed to proactively reconfigure wireless environments to improve both sensing and communication (S&C) performance. First, we exploit a single IRS to enable wireless sensing in the base station's (BS's) non-line-of-sight (NLoS) area. In particular, we present three IRS-enabled NLoS target sensing architectures with fully-passive, semi-passive, and active IRSs, respectively. We compare their pros and cons by analyzing the fundamental sensing performance limits for target detection and parameter estimation. Next, we consider a single IRS to facilitate integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), in which the transmit signals at the BS are used for achieving both S&C functionalities, aided by the IRS through reflective beamforming. We present joint transmit signal and receiver processing designs for realizing efficient ISAC, and jointly optimize the transmit beamforming at the BS and reflective beamforming at the IRS to balance the fundamental performance tradeoff between S&C. Furthermore, we discuss multi-IRS networked ISAC, by particularly focusing on multi-IRS-enabled multi-link ISAC, multi-region ISAC, and ISAC signal routing, respectively. Finally, we highlight various promising research topics in this area to motivate future work.