RIS-aided ISAC with $K$-Rydberg Atomic Receivers

Abstract: In this paper, we investigate a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) framework equipped with multiple Rydberg atomic receiver (RAR)-aided users. By leveraging the reference-assisted reception mechanism of RARs, we develop a unified signal model that jointly captures downlink multi-user communication with RARs and monostatic radar sensing. To explicitly balance communication performance and sensing accuracy, we formulate a Cramer-Rao bound (CRB)-constrained utility maximization problem. To address these challenges, we propose a joint optimization framework that combines fractional programming (FP), majorization-minimization (MM), and the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework consistently outperforms the conventional approach over a wide range of system environments, thereby highlighting the importance of the proposed framework in unlocking the potential of RARs for 6G.