Multi-IRS-Aided Doppler-Tolerant Wideband DFRC System

Abstract: Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is recognized as an enabler of future dual-function radar-communications (DFRC) by improving spectral efficiency, coverage, parameter estimation, and interference suppression. Prior studies on IRS-aided DFRC focus either on narrowband processing, single-IRS deployment, static targets, non-clutter scenario, or on the under-utilized line-of-sight (LoS) and non-line-of-sight (NLoS) paths. In this paper, we address the aforementioned shortcomings by optimizing a wideband DFRC system comprising multiple IRSs and a dual-function base station that jointly processes the LoS and NLoS wideband multi-carrier signals to improve both the communications SINR and the radar SINR in the presence of a moving target and clutter. We formulate the transmit, {receive} and IRS beamformer design as the maximization of the worst-case radar signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) subject to transmit power and communications SINR. We tackle this nonconvex problem under the alternating optimization framework, where the subproblems are solved by a combination of Dinkelbach algorithm, consensus alternating direction method of multipliers, and Riemannian steepest decent. Our numerical experiments show that the proposed multi-IRS-aided wideband DFRC provides over $4$ dB radar SINR and $31.7$\% improvement in target detection over a single-IRS system.