RIS-Assisted High Resolution Radar Sensing

Journal article, 2025

This paper analyzes monostatic sensing by a user equipment (UE) for a setting in which the UE is unable to resolve multiple targets due to their interference within a single resolution bin. It is shown how sensing accuracy, in terms of both detection rate and localization accuracy, can be boosted by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), which can be advantageously used to provide signal diversity and aid in resolving the targets. Specifically, assuming prior information on the presence of a cluster of targets, a RIS beam sweep procedure is used to facilitate the high resolution sensing. This setting requires a tailored Fisher analysis, as well as introduction of two new coherence concepts that are central to the derived theoretical bounds, namely the Cramér-Rao lower bound and a new upper bound on the detection probability. Next, we propose an orthogonal matching pursuit channel estimation algorithm combined with data association to fuse the information of the non-RIS signal and the RIS signal and perform sensing. Finally, we provide numerical results to verify the potential of RIS for improving sensor resolution, and to demonstrate that the proposed methods can realize this potential for RIS-assisted high resolution sensing.