RIS-Enabled ISAC in Post-Disaster Communications

This study aims to deliver communication services to clustered groups of individuals who have lost connectivity during a disaster by employing a minibus equipped with a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). Since the serving macro base station (BS) does not have a direct line-of-sight (LoS) path to these users after the disaster, their locations cannot be sensed by the BS itself. Therefore, the centers of these clustered user groups are assumed to be estimated by a separate integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) based BS that retains LoS sensing visibility to the affected region. To assess the effect of externally provided ISAC-based cluster estimation on system performance, the position, orientation angle, and phase parameters of the RIS-assisted system are obtained considering slight deviations from the actual user location. Then, the achievable data rates under these imperfect estimations are compared with those obtained in the ideal case.