Holographic Surface Enabled Integrated Sensing and Communications

TL;DR

Holographic surfaces using reconfigurable holographic surfaces (RHSs) offer a cost-effective, energy-efficient solution for integrated sensing and communications in 6G, enabling flexible beamforming under practical hardware constraints.

Contribution

This paper provides a comprehensive tutorial on HISAC, introducing holographic beamforming with RHSs and presenting optimization frameworks, system implementations, and experimental results.

Findings

HISAC enhances joint communication and sensing capabilities.

Holographic beamforming with RHSs is feasible under hardware constraints.

Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of HISAC implementations.

Abstract

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) is an essential 6G capability for joint data transmission and environmental sensing. To support 6G scenarios with stringent ISAC performance requirements, existing massive-MIMO-based systems are expected to scale toward ultra-massive MIMO. However, this scaling incurs prohibitive cost and power consumption when realized using widely adopted phased arrays with complex phase shifters and feeding networks. Recently, holographic integrated sensing and communications (HISAC) has emerged as a promising paradigm to address this issue. It employs reconfigurable holographic surfaces (RHSs), a type of leaky-wave antenna, as a cost- and energy-efficient implementation of ultra-massive MIMO-based ISAC, and offers enhanced flexibility for ISAC beam synthesis through holographic beamforming. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive tutorial on HISAC, focusing on how RHS-enabled holographic beamforming can be exploited to jointly support communication and sensing under practical hardware constraints. We first introduce the fundamentals of RHSs and discuss the unique leakage power constraint of holographic beamforming. We then present a general optimization framework for HISAC and show how HISAC enhances joint communication and sensing, sensing-assisted communication, and communication-assisted sensing. We further present HISAC system implementations and experimental results. Finally, we outline promising research directions for HISAC, highlighting the potential of HISAC in advancing efficient, flexible, and high-performance ISAC networks.