Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) are envisioned to be an integral part of future wireless networks, especially when operating at the millimeter-wave (mm-wave) and terahertz (THz) frequency bands. However, establishing wireless connections at these high frequencies is quite challenging, mainly due to the penetrating path loss that prevents reliable communication and sensing. Another emerging technology for next-generation wireless systems is reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), which refers to hardware-efficient planar structures capable of modifying harsh propagation environments. In this article, we provide a tutorial-style overview of the applications and benefits of RISs for sensing functionalities in general, and for ISAC systems in particular. We highlight the potential advantages when fusing these two emerging technologies, and identify for the first time that 1) joint sensing and communications (S&C) designs are most beneficial when the channels referring to these operations are coupled, and that 2) RISs offer the means for controlling this beneficial coupling. The usefulness of RIS-aided ISAC goes beyond the obvious individual gains of each of these technologies in both performance and power efficiency. We also discuss the main signal processing challenges and future research directions that arise from the fusion of these two emerging technologies.

We consider transmit beamforming and reflection pattern design in reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems to jointly precode communication symbols and radar waveforms. We treat two settings of multiple users and targets. In the first, we use a single RIS to enhance the communication performance of the ISAC system and design beams with good cross-correlation properties to match a desired beampattern while guaranteeing a desired signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) for each user. In the second setting, we use two dedicated RISs to aid the ISAC system, wherein the beams are designed to maximize the worst-case target illumination power while guaranteeing a desired SINR for each user. We propose solvers based on alternating optimization as the design problems in both cases are non-convex optimization problems. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate the advantages of RIS-assisted ISAC systems. In particular, we show that the proposed single-RIS assisted ISAC system improves the minimum user SINR while suffering from a moderate loss in radar target illumination power. On the other hand, the dual-RIS assisted ISAC system improves both minimum user SINR as well as worst-case target illumination power at the targets, especially when the users and targets are not directly visible.

Radio maps find numerous applications in wireless communications and mobile robotics tasks, including resource allocation, interference coordination, and mission planning. Although numerous existing techniques construct radio maps from spatially distributed measurements, the locations of such measurements are predetermined beforehand. In contrast, this paper proposes spectrum surveying, where a mobile robot such as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) collects measurements at a set of locations that are actively selected to obtain high-quality map estimates in a short surveying time. This is performed in two steps. First, two novel algorithms, a model-based online Bayesian estimator and a data-driven deep learning algorithm, are devised for updating a map estimate and an uncertainty metric that indicates the informativeness of measurements at each possible location. These algorithms offer complementary benefits and feature constant complexity per measurement. Second, the uncertainty metric is used to plan the trajectory of the UAV to gather measurements at the most informative locations. To overcome the combinatorial complexity of this problem, a dynamic programming approach is proposed to obtain lists of waypoints through areas of large uncertainty in linear time. Numerical experiments conducted on a realistic dataset confirm that the proposed scheme constructs accurate radio maps quickly.

In large-scale wireless acoustic sensor networks (WASNs), many of the sensors will only have a marginal contribution to a certain estimation task. Involving all sensors increases the energy budget unnecessarily and decreases the lifetime of the WASN. Using microphone subset selection, also termed as sensor selection, the most informative sensors can be chosen from a set of candidate sensors to achieve a prescribed inference performance. In this paper, we consider microphone subset selection for minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer based noise reduction. The best subset of sensors is determined by minimizing the transmission cost while constraining the output noise power (or signal-to-noise ratio). Assuming the statistical information on correlation matrices of the sensor measurements is available, the sensor selection problem for this model-driven scheme is first solved by utilizing convex optimization techniques. In addition, to avoid estimating the statistics related to all the candidate sensors beforehand, we also propose a data-driven approach to select the best subset using a greedy strategy. The performance of the greedy algorithm converges to that of the model-driven method, while it displays advantages in dynamic scenarios as well as on computational complexity. Compared to a sparse MVDR or radius-based beamformer, experiments show that the proposed methods can guarantee the desired performance with significantly less transmission costs.

Multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar is known for its superiority over conventional radar due to its antenna and waveform diversity. Although higher angular resolution, improved parameter identifiability, and better target detection are achieved, the hardware costs (due to multiple transmitters and multiple receivers) and high energy consumption (multiple pulses) limit the usage of MIMO radars in large scale networks. On one hand, higher angle and velocity estimation accuracy is required, but on the other hand, a lower number of antennas/pulses is desirable. To achieve such a compromise, in this work, the Cram\'er-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for the angle and velocity estimator is employed as a performance metric to design the antenna and pulse placement. It is shown that the CRLB derived for two targets is a more appropriate criterion in comparison with the single-target CRLB since the two-target CRLB takes into account both the mainlobe width and sidelobe level of the ambiguity function. In this paper, several algorithms for antenna and pulse selection based on convex and submodular optimization are proposed. Numerical experiments are provided to illustrate the developed theory.