In this paper, we investigate a novel integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system aided by movable antennas (MAs). A bistatic radar system, in which the base station (BS) is configured with MAs, is integrated into a multi-user multiple-input-single-output (MU-MISO) system. Flexible beamforming is studied by jointly optimizing the antenna coefficients and the antenna positions. Compared to conventional fixed-position antennas (FPAs), MAs provide a new degree of freedom (DoF) in beamforming to reconfigure the field response, and further improve the received signal quality for both wireless communication and sensing. We propose a communication rate and sensing mutual information (MI) maximization problem by flexible beamforming optimization. The complex fractional objective function with logarithms are first transformed with the fractional programming (FP) framework. Then, we propose an efficient algorithm to address the non-convex problem with coupled variables by alternatively solving four sub-problems. We derive the closed-form expression to update the antenna coefficients by Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. To improve the direct gradient ascent (DGA) scheme in updating the positions of the antennas, a 3-stage search-based projected GA (SPGA) method is proposed. Simulation results show that MAs significantly enhance the overall performance of the ISAC system, achieving 59.8% performance gain compared to conventional ISAC system enabled by FPAs. Meanwhile, the proposed SPGA-based method has remarkable performance improvement compared the DGA method in antenna position optimization.

In this paper, a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided millimeter wave (mmWave) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system is analyzed. In particular, we consider an RIS-aided mmWave-NOMA downlink system with a hybrid beamforming structure. To maximize the achievable sum-rate under a minimum rate constraint for the users and a maximum transmit power constraint, a joint RIS phase shifts, hybrid beamforming, and power allocation problem is formulated. To solve this non-convex optimization problem, we develop an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm. Specifically, first, the non-convex problem is transformed into three subproblems, i.e., power allocation, joint phase shifts and analog beamforming optimization, and digital beamforming design. Then, we solve the power allocation problem by keeping fixed the phase shifts of the RIS and the hybrid beamforming. Finally, given the power allocation matrix, an alternating manifold optimization (AMO)-based method and a successive convex approximation (SCA)-based method are utilized to design the phase shifts, analog beamforming, and transmit beamforming, respectively. Numerical results reveal that the proposed AO algorithm outperforms existing schemes in terms of sum-rate. Moreover, compared to a conventional mmWave-NOMA system without RIS, the proposed RIS-aided mmWave-NOMA system is capable of improving the achievable sum-rate.

This letter rethinks traditional precoding in multi-user wireless communications with movable antennas (MAs). Utilizing MAs for optimal antenna positioning, we introduce a sparse optimization (SO)-based approach focusing on regularized zero-forcing (RZF). This framework targets the optimization of antenna positions and the precoding matrix to minimize inter-user interference and transmit power. We propose an off-grid regularized least squares-based orthogonal matching pursuit (RLS-OMP) method for this purpose. Moreover, we provide deeper insights into antenna position optimization using RLS-OMP, viewed from a subspace projection angle. Overall, our proposed flexible precoding scheme demonstrates a sum rate that exceeds more than twice that of fixed antenna positions.

Near-field communications present new opportunities over near-field channels, however, the spherical wavefront propagation makes near-field signal processing challenging. In this context, this paper proposes efficient near-field channel estimation methods for wideband MIMO mmWave systems with the aid of extremely large-scale reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (XL-RIS). For the wideband signals reflected by the analog RIS, we characterize their near-field beam squint effect in both angle and distance domains. Based on the mathematical analysis of the near-field beam patterns over all frequencies, a wideband spherical-domain dictionary is constructed by minimizing the coherence of two arbitrary beams. In light of this, we formulate a two-dimensional compressive sensing problem to recover the channel parameter based on the spherical-domain sparsity of mmWave channels. To this end, we present a correlation coefficient-based atom matching method within our proposed multi-frequency parallelizable subspace recovery framework for efficient solutions. Additionally, we propose a two-dimensional oracle estimator as a benchmark and derive its lower bound across all subcarriers. Our findings emphasize the significance of system hyperparameters and the sensing matrix of each subcarrier in determining the accuracy of the estimation. Finally, numerical results show that our proposed method achieves considerable performance compared with the lower bound and has a time complexity linear to the number of RIS elements.

Extremely large-scale reconfigurable intelligent surface (XL-RIS) has been a prospective capacity-enhancing technique. Faced with XL-RIS-aided millimeter wave (mmWave) communications, we propose a low-complexity channel estimation strategy with the near-field spherical wavefront assumption. It separates the whole channel estimation procedure into two phases to decrease pilot use and computational complexity: 1) estimation of angular-domain parameters of the base station (BS) and users equipped with the hybrid beamforming architecture, and 2) estimation of cascaded angular- and polar-domain parameters of the XL-RIS. Particularly, in the first and second phases, the three-dimensional multiple measurement vector compressive sensing (3D-M-CS) framework and the 3D distributed CS (3D-D-CS) framework are proposed for enhanced parameter estimation, respectively. Then the variants of Look Ahead Orthogonal Match Pursuit (LAOMP), i.e., 3D-M-LAOMP and 3D-D-LAOMP, are developed for solving our proposed CS frameworks.

In this paper, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is employed in a millimeter wave (mmWave) integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) system. To alleviate the multi-hop attenuation, the semi-self sensing RIS approach is adopted, wherein sensors are configured at the RIS to receive the radar echo signal. Focusing on the estimation accuracy, the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) for estimating the direction-of-the-angles is derived as the metric for sensing performance. A joint optimization problem on hybrid beamforming and RIS phase shifts is proposed to minimize the CRB, while maintaining satisfactory communication performance evaluated by the achievable data rate. The CRB minimization problem is first transformed as a more tractable form based on Fisher information matrix (FIM). To solve the complex non-convex problem, a double layer loop algorithm is proposed based on penalty concave-convex procedure (penalty-CCCP) and block coordinate descent (BCD) method with two sub-problems. Successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithm and second order cone (SOC) constraints are employed to tackle the non-convexity in the hybrid beamforming optimization. To optimize the unit modulus constrained analog beamforming and phase shifts, manifold optimization (MO) is adopted. Finally, the numerical results verify the effectiveness of the proposed CRB minimization algorithm, and show the performance improvement compared with other baselines. Additionally, the proposed hybrid beamforming algorithm can achieve approximately 96% of the sensing performance exhibited by the full digital approach within only a limited number of radio frequency (RF) chains.