RIS-Assisted Integrated Sensing and Covert Communication Design

For the sake of enhancing the covertness and sensing performance in the integrated sensing and covert communications (ISCCs) system, we design a beamforming framework for reconfigurable intelligence surface (RIS) assisted ISCC. Specifically, the system intends to transmit information to a legitimate receiver (Bob) covertly and sense the target simultaneously while avoiding being detected by a warden (Willie). RIS can be applied to both traditional single-connected networks and a broad fully connected networks. By jointly optimizing the beamforming vector of the communication and the autocorrelation matrix of the sensing, and the phase shift matrix of the RIS, both the convert rate and the target’s probing power are maximized. And the covertness and the constant-mode constraints are considered. A multistrategy alternate optimization (MSAO) algorithm is proposed to solve the optimization problem based on quadratic constraint quadratic programming (QCQP) and semidefinite relaxation (SDR). Furthermore, we consider a more realistic application scenario where the legal party has imperfect channel state information of Willie. Simulation results show that deploying RIS in a generalized fully connected mode can achieve better transmission of beampatterns and increase upper limit of covert communications rate than conventional single-connected mode.