Transmission Design of Active RIS-assisted Integrated Sensing and Communication Systems

This paper investigates the transmission design of an active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system. A sensing beampattern matching mean squared error (MSE) minimization problem is formulated under constraints of the power budgets at the base station and the RIS, the amplification factor of the RIS and the information rate requirements of users, by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming vectors, the covariance matrix of the sensing signal and the reflection coefficients of the RIS. The considered problem is solved in an alternative optimization manner by decomposing the original problem into two sub-problems, where each sub-problem is solved via semi-definite relaxation (SDR) and successive convex approximation (SCA). The tightness of applying SDR is theoretically proved. Simulation results verify the convergence behavior and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. It is also shown that the active RIS is able to improve the sensing beampattern matching performance by enhancing the information transmission.