Codesign of transmit waveform and reflective beamforming for active reconfigurable intelligent surface-aided MIMO ISAC system

This article discusses the active reconfigurable intelligent surface (ARIS)-aided integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system for non-line-of-sight (NLoS) target sensing in cluttered environments while performing multi-user communication. To optimize sensing and communication performance simultaneously, we jointly design the shared transmit waveform, ARIS reflection coefficients and radar receive filter by using the multi-user interference and the reciprocal of radar output signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio as metrics. Limited by practical requirements, the transmit waveform suffers from constant modulus or total energy constraints and the ARIS is subject to both maximum power and amplification gain constraints. Based on these considerations, the proposed codesign is formulated into a nonconvex constrained fractional function minimization problem. To tackle it effectively, we first translate the fractional objective into an integral form by employing Dinkelbach transform and then propose an alternating optimization-based algorithm, where the transmit waveform and ARIS reflection coefficients are respectively optimized by the customized algorithms based on the consensus alternating direction method of multipliers, and the receive filter has a closed-form optimal solution. Numerical results demonstrate that the ARIS-aided ISAC concurrently achieve superior NLoS sensing and communication performance to passive reconfigurable intelligent surface-aided and traditional ISACs in cluttered environments, regardless of waveform constraints and sensing-communication trade-off factor.