Full-duplex-enabled joint communications and sensing with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces

The full-duplex (FD) technology has the potential to radically evolve wireless systems, facilitating the integration of both communications and radar functionalities into a single device, thus, enabling joint communication and sensing (JCAS). In this paper, we present a novel approach for JCAS that incorporates a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) in the near-field of an FD multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) node, which is jointly optimized with the digital beamformers to enable JSAC and efficiently handle self-interference (SI). We propose a novel problem formulation for FD MIMO JCAS systems to jointly minimize the total received power at the FD node’s radar receiver, while maximizing the sum rate of downlink communications subject to a Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) constraint. In contrast to the typically used CRB in the relevant literature, we derive a novel, more accurate, target estimation bound that fully takes into account the RIS deployment. The considered problem is solved using alternating optimization, which is guaranteed to converge to a local optimum. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves significant performance improvement both for communications and sensing. It is showcased that, jointly designing the FD MIMO beamformers and the RIS phase configuration to be SI aware can significantly loosen the requirement for additional SI cancellation.