Joint Communication and Sensing in RIS-Assisted MIMO System Under Mutual Coupling

Abstract: This paper considers a downlink Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS)-assisted Joint Communication and Sensing (JCAS) system within a physically-consistent setting, accounting for the effect of mutual coupling between RIS elements arising due to sub-element spacing. The system features a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) terrestrial base station (BS) and explores both monostatic and bistatic radar configurations to enable joint communication and sensing. In the monostatic configuration, both the transmitter and receiver are at the same location, while the bistatic configuration separates the transmitter and receiver spatially. System performance is evaluated using Fisher Information (FI) to quantify sensing accuracy and Mutual Information (MI) to measure communication efficiency. To achieve an optimal balance between communication and sensing, the RIS reflective coefficients and BS transmit beamforming are jointly optimized by maximizing a weighted sum of FI and MI. A novel solution approach is proposed for a single-user, single-object scenario, leveraging the mutual coupling model to enhance system realism. The impact of self-interference on sensing performance is also investigated through signal quantization. Numerical results reveal a fundamental trade-off between FI and MI and demonstrate that incorporating mutual coupling within a physically-consistent framework significantly improves both communication and sensing performance compared to conventional RIS-assisted JCAS models. Additionally, the analysis highlights how the choice of monostatic versus bistatic radar configuration affects system performance, offering valuable insights for the design of RIS-assisted JCAS systems.