Subset Selection Based RIS-Aided Beamforming for Joint Radar-Communications

Joint radar-communications (JRC) benefits from multi-functionality of radar and communication operations using same hardware and radio frequency (RF) spectrum resources. Thus, JRC systems possess very high potential to be employed into the sixth generation (6G) standards. Besides, intelligent reflecting surfaces have attracted wide attention in communication systems, due to low complexity of implementation. This paper designs a dynamic beamformer for reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) which maximizes spectral efficiency (SE). We jointly express the mutual information rate for communication and radar entities including a weighting factor which depicts the dominance of one operation over the other. The joint-SE based proposed method optimally selects the RIS subset. Furthermore, when the communication operation takes place the proposed method takes into account the interference occurring from the radar operation and vice-versa. Fractional programming based selection procedure is used for solving the problem of subset selection. Simulation results are presented and compared with different baselines to show effectiveness of the proposed method.