RIS-Enabled NLoS Near-Field Joint Position and Velocity Estimation under User Mobility

Abstract: In the context of single-base station (BS) non-line-of-sight (NLoS) single-epoch localization with the aid of a reflective reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), this paper introduces a novel three-step algorithm that jointly estimates the position and velocity of a mobile user equipment (UE), while compensating for the Doppler effects observed in near-field (NF) at the RIS elements over the short transmission duration of a sequence of downlink (DL) pilot symbols. First, a low-complexity initialization procedure is proposed, relying in part on far-field (FF) approximation and a static user assumption. Then, an alternating optimization procedure is designed to iteratively refine the velocity and position estimates, as well as the channel gain. The refinement routines leverage small angle approximations and the linearization of the RIS response, accounting for both NF and mobility effects. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm through extensive simulations under diverse operating conditions with regard to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), UE mobility, uncontrolled multipath and RIS-UE distance. Our results reveal remarkable performance improvements over the state-of-the-art (SoTA) mobility-agnostic benchmark algorithm, while indicating convergence of the proposed algorithm to respective theoretical bounds on position and velocity estimation.