RIS-Assisted Coordinated Multi-Point ISAC for Low-Altitude Sensing Coverage

Abstract: The low-altitude economy (LAE) has emerged and developed in various fields, which has gained considerable interest. To ensure the security of LAE, it is essential to establish a proper sensing coverage scheme for monitoring the unauthorized targets. Introducing integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) into cellular networks is a promising solution that enables coordinated multiple base stations (BSs) to significantly enhance sensing performance and extend coverage. Meanwhile, deploying a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) can mitigate signal blockages between BSs and low-altitude targets in urban areas. Therefore, this paper focuses on the low-altitude sensing coverage problem in RIS-assisted coordinated multi-point ISAC networks, where a RIS is employed to enable multiple BSs to sense a prescribed region while serving multiple communication users. A joint beamforming and phase shifts design is proposed to minimize the total transmit power while guaranteeing sensing signal-to-noise ratio and communication spectral efficiency. To tackle this non-convex optimization problem, an efficient algorithm is proposed by using the alternating optimization and semi-definite relaxation techniques. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed scheme over the baseline schemes.