Semi-Passive 3D Positioning of Multiple RIS-Enabled Users

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are set to be a revolutionary technology in the 6th generation of wireless systems. In this work, we study the application of RIS in a multi-user passive localization scenario, where we have one transmitter (TX) and multiple asynchronous receivers (RXs) with known locations. Classical approaches fail in this scenario due to lack of synchronization and lack of data association between multi-static measurements and users. To resolve this, we consider each user to be equipped with an RIS, and show that we can avoid the data association problem and estimate users’ 3D position with submeter accuracy in a large area around the transmitter, using time-of-arrival measurements at the RXs. We develop a low-complexity estimator that attains the corresponding Cramér-Rao bound as well as a novel RIS phase profile design to remove inter-path interference.