STARS enabled integrated sensing and communications

A simultaneously transmitting and reflecting surface (STARS) enabled integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) framework is proposed, where the entire space is partitioned by STARS into a sensing space and a communication space. A novel sensing-at-STARS structure is proposed, where dedicated sensors are mounted at STARS to address the significant path loss and clutter interference of sensing. The Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) of the two-dimensional (2D) direction-of-arrivals (DOAs) estimation of the sensing target is derived, which is then minimized subject to the minimum communication requirement. A novel approach is proposed to transform the complicated CRB minimization problem into a trackable modified Fisher information matrix (FIM) optimization problem. Both independent and coupled phase-shift models of STARS are investigated: 1) For the independent phase-shift model, to address the coupling problem of ISAC waveform and STARS coefficient, an efficient double-loop iterative algorithm based on the penalty dual decomposition (PDD) framework is conceived; 2) For the coupled phase-shift model, based on the PDD framework, a low complexity alternating optimization algorithm is proposed to tackle the coupled phase-shift constraint by alternately optimizing the amplitude and phase-shift coefficients of STARS with closed-form expressions. Finally, the numerical results demonstrate that: 1) STARS significantly outperforms conventional RIS in terms of CRB under the communication constraints; 2) coupled phase-shift model achieves comparable performance to the independent one for low communication requirements or sufficient STARS elements; 3) it is more efficient to increase the number of passive elements of STARS than the active elements of the sensor; 4) higher sensing accuracy can be achieved by STARS using the practical 2D maximum likelihood estimator compared with the conventional RIS.