A Lightweight Framework for Integrated Sensing and Communications with RIS

TL;DR

This paper proposes a lightweight RIS phase design framework for integrated sensing and communication that offers a closed-form solution, balancing performance and complexity for future 6G networks.

Contribution

It introduces a novel RIS configuration method that simplifies optimization with a closed-form solution, improving scalability and efficiency over traditional methods.

Findings

Achieves comparable performance to SDR-based methods

Significantly reduces computational complexity

Effectively balances communication and sensing trade-offs

Abstract

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) have been recognized as a promising technology to enhance both communication and sensing performance in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems for future 6G networks. However, existing RIS optimization methods for improving ISAC performance are mainly based on semidefinite relaxation (SDR) or iterative algorithms. The former suffers from high computational complexity and limited scalability, especially when the number of RIS elements becomes large, while the latter yields suboptimal solutions whose performance depends on initialization. In this work, we introduce a lightweight RIS phase design framework that provides a closed-form solution and explicitly accounts for the trade-off between communication and sensing, as well as proportional beam gain distribution toward multiple sensing targets. The key idea is to partition the RIS configuration into two parts: the first part is designed to maximize the communication performance, while the second introduces small perturbations to generate multiple beams for multi-target sensing. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach and demonstrate that it achieves performance comparable to SDR but with significantly lower computational complexity.