Joint Location Sensing and Demodulation for IRS-Assisted ISAC mmWave MIMO Systems

An integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system assisted by distributed passive intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) is proposed in this paper, which enables simultaneous signal demodulation and location sensing, without channel state information (CSI). A detailed workflow of the proposed IRS-based ISAC system is designed, including transmission protocol, joint location sensing and demodulation, as well as beamforming optimization. Specifically, each coherent block consists of two stages, and each stage is divided into two time blocks, where the signal demodulation, channel estimation, and location sensing are conducted by the proposed integrated localization and demodulation (I-LAD) algorithm, simultaneously. Simulation results show that the signal demodulation performance of the proposed I-LAD algorithm is close to that of the benchmark scheme assuming perfect CSI. At the same time, the channel estimation performance is comparable to that of the parallel factor decomposition (PAPRFAC) method or the compressive sensing-based channel estimation (CS-EST) method. In addition, the proposed location sensing scheme almost achieves the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for distributed IRS-assisted localization-only systems, confirming the effectiveness of the proposed I-LAD algorithm.