Enhanced Vehicle Tracking in ISAC Networks: Joint Beamforming and Intelligent Omni-Surface Optimization via Zeroth-Order Approach

Recent advancements in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technology offer significant potential for high-resolution localization and high-throughput communication in vehicular networks. However, many existing ISAC models treat vehicles as point-like objects, which oversimplifies real-world scenarios. In practice, vehicles have complex shapes and sizes, which may occupy multiple range and angle grids. Additionally, the limited transmit power of roadside units (RSUs) and the small radar cross section (RCS) of vehicles can result in weak echo signals, hindering effective vehicle detection and tracking. To address these challenges, we propose an intelligent omni-surface (IOS) mounted on the top surface of an extended vehicle and introduce a novel IOS-aided extended vehicle tracking scheme. Our approach optimizes both RSU beamforming and IOS configuration (including refraction and reflection amplitudes and phase shifts) to minimize the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) while meeting communication rate requirements. Solving this optimization problem is challenging due to the complex variable-coupling and the implicit CRB expression. To overcome these difficulties, we present a zeroth-order optimization based increasing penalty dual decomposition (ZO-IPDD) algorithm. Additionally, a dimension reduction strategy is employed to mitigate the high computational complexity. Numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed ZO-IPDD algorithm and the superior performance of the tracking scheme compared to existing methods.