RIS-Enabled Passive Radar towards Target Localization

Abstract: In this paper, we study a communication-centric integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) approach, where an access point (AP) communicates with users, while a passive radar (PR) is present in the environment. We investigate the deployment of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to enable the PR to localize a target. We derive an optimization problem for updating the phase shifters of the RIS per epoch. Due to the limited information at the PR, such as unknown payload information and unknown number of targets in the scene, we propose two methods capable of performing joint angle of arrival estimation and detection of the targets. We demonstrate the superior performance of the methods onto the proposed setting through numerical simulations, in comparison to a no-RIS baseline scheme.