Dual-functional Internet of Meta-material Things Networks: Integrated Sensing and Communication

The Internet of Meta-material Things (Meta-IoT) has significant potential for future IoT applications due to its ability to function without a battery and its ease of maintenance. Specially, the environmental information can be obtained by analyzing the frequency response of Meta-IoT sensor from the reflected signals. Through the reflection, these Meta-IoT sensors can also provide additional paths for improving communication performance while performing sensing. In this paper, we design a dual-functional Meta-IoT network for integrated sensing and communication (ISAC), i.e., the Meta-IoT sensors can sense environmental conditions and facilitate communication simultaneously. However, ensuring the quality of both sensing and communication for multiple users is not trivial since the impact of the sensor structure on sensing and communication at the same time. Moreover, a customized beamforming scheme is required to balance the performance of two functions. To address these challenges, we optimize the sensor structure and the transmit beamforming. Simulation results show that the communication performance can be significantly improved with the proposed scheme while the sensing performance is guaranteed.