Blinding the Wiretapper: RIS-Enabled User Occultation in the ISAC Era

An undesirable consequence of the foreseeable proliferation of sophisticated integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) technologies is the enabling of spoofing, by malicious agents, of situational information (such as proximity, direction or location) of legitimate users of wireless systems. In order to mitigate this threat, we present a novel ISAC scheme that, aided by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), enables the occultation of the positions of user equipment (UE) from wiretappers, while maintaining both sensing and desired communication performance between the UEs and a legitimate base station (BS). To that end, we first formulate an RIS phase-shift optimization problem that jointly maximizes the sum-rate performance of the UEs (communication objective), while minimizing the projection of the wiretapper's effective channel onto the legitimate channel (hiding objective), thereby disrupting the attempts by a wiretapper of localizing the UEs. Then, in order to efficiently solve the resulting non-convex joint optimization problem, a novel manifold optimization algorithm is derived, whose effectiveness is validated by numerical results, which demonstrate that the proposed approach preserves legitimate ISAC performance while significantly degrading the wiretapper's sensing capability.

Quantum Manifold Optimization: A Design Framework for Future Communications Systems

Inspired by recent developments in various areas of science relevant to quantum computing, we introduce quantum manifold optimization (QMO) as a promising framework for solving constrained optimization problems in next-generation wireless communication systems. We begin by showing how classical wireless design problems - such as pilot design in cell-free (CF)-massive MIMO (mMIMO), beamformer optimization in gigantic multiple input multiple output (MIMO), and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) phase tuning - naturally reside on structured manifolds like the Stiefel, Grassmannian, and oblique manifolds, with the latter novelly formulated in this work. Then, we demonstrate how these problems can be reformulated as trace-based quantum expectation values over variationally-encoded quantum states. While theoretical in scope, the work lays a foundation for a new class of quantum optimization algorithms with broad application to the design of future beyond-sixth-generation (B6G) systems.

Chirp-Permuted AFDM for Quantum-Resilient Physical-Layer Secure Communications

This article presents a novel physical-layer secure communications scheme based on the recently discovered chirp-permuted affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM) waveform, which results in a completely different received signal to the eavesdropper with the incorrect chirp-permutation order, even under co-located eavesdropping with perfect channel information. The security of the proposed scheme is studied in terms of the complexity required to find the correct permutation via classical and quantum search algorithms, which are shown to be infeasible due the factorially-scaling search space, as well as theoretical and simulated analyses of a random-guess approach, indicating an infeasible probability of breach by chance.

A Doubly-Dispersive MIMO Channel Model Parametrized with Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces

Introduced with the advent of statistical wireless channel models for high mobility communications and having a profound role in communication-centric (CC) integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), the doubly-dispersive (DD) channel structure has long been heralded as a useful tool enabling the capture of the most important fading effects undergone by an arbitrary time-domain transmit signal propagating through some medium. However, the incorporation of this model into multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system setups, relying on the recent paradigm-shifting transceiver architecture based on stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM), in an environment with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) remains an open problem due to the many intricate details that have to be accounted for. In this paper, we fill this gap by introducing a novel DD MIMO channel model that incorporates an arbitrary number of RISs in the ambient, as well as SIMs equipping both the transmitter and receiver. We then discuss how the proposed metasurfaces-parametrized DD (MPDD) channel model can be seamlessly applied to waveforms that are known to perform well in DD environments, namely, orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS), and affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM), with each having their own inherent advantages and disadvantages. An illustrative application of the programmable functionality of the proposed model is finally presented to showcase its potential for boosting the performance of the aforementioned waveforms. Our numerical results indicate that the design of waveforms suitable to mitigating the effects of DD channels is significantly impacted by the emerging SIM technology.

Grover Adaptive Search for Maximum Likelihood Detection of Generalized Spatial Modulation

We propose a quantum-assisted solution for the maximum likelihood detection (MLD) of generalized spatial modulation (GSM) signals. Specifically, the MLD of GSM is first formulated as a novel polynomial optimization problem, followed by the application of a quantum algorithm, namely, the Grover adaptive search. The performance in terms of query complexity of the proposed method is evaluated and compared to the classical alternative via a numerical analysis, which reveals that under fault-tolerant quantum computation, the proposed method outperforms the classical solution if the number of data symbols and the constellation size are relatively large.

Enabling Next-Generation V2X Perception: Wireless Rigid Body Localization and Tracking

Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) perception describes a suite of technologies used to enable vehicles to perceive their surroundings and communicate with various entities, such as other road users, infrastructure, or the network/cloud. With the development of autonomous driving, V2X perception is becoming increasingly relevant, as can be seen by the tremendous attention recently given to integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) technologies. In this context, rigid body localization (RBL) also emerges as one important technology which enables the estimation of not only target's positions, but also their shape and orientation. This article discusses the need for RBL, its benefits and opportunities, challenges and research directions, as well as its role in the standardization of the sixth-generation (6G) and beyond fifth generation (B5G) applications.

Belief Propagation-based Rotation and Translation Estimation for Rigid Body Localization

We propose a novel solution to the rigid body localization (RBL) problem, in which the three-dimensional (3D) rotation and translation is estimated by only utilizing the range measurements between the wireless sensors on the rigid body and the anchor sensors. The proposed framework first constructs a linear Gaussian belief propagation (GaBP) algorithm to estimate the absolute sensor positions utilizing the range-based received signal model, which is used for the reconstruction of the RBL transformation model, linearized with a small-angle approximation. In light of the reformulated system, a second bivariate GaBP is designed to directly estimate the 3D rotation angles and translation distances, with an interference cancellation (IC) refinement to improve the angle estimation performance. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified via numerical simulations, highlighting the superior performance of the proposed method against the state-of-the-art (SotA) techniques for the position, rotation, and translation estimation performance.

Massive Index Modulation with Combinatorics-Free Detection for Integrated Sensing and Communications

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) and index modulation (IM) are promising technologies for beyond fifth generation (B5G) and sixth generation (6G) systems. While ISAC enables new applications, IM is attractive for its inherent energy and spectral efficiencies. In this article we propose massive IM as an enabler of ISAC, by considering transmit signals with information conveyed through the indexation of the resources utilized in their transmission, and pilot symbols exploited for sensing. In order to overcome the complexity hurdle arising from the large sizes of IM codebooks, we propose a novel message passing (MP) decoder designed under the Gaussian belief propagation (GaBP) framework exploiting a novel unit vector decomposition (UVD) of IM signals with purpose-derived novel probability distributions. The proposed method enjoys a low decoding complexity that is independent of combinatorial factors, while still approaching the performance of unfeasible state-of-the-art (SotA) search-based methods. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated via complexity analysis and numerical results for piloted generalized quadrature spatial modulation (GQSM) systems of large sizes (up to 96 antennas).

Blind Bistatic Radar Parameter Estimation in Doubly-Dispersive Channels

We propose a novel method for blind bistatic radar parameter estimation (RPE), which enables integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) by allowing passive (receive) base stations (BSs) to extract radar parameters (ranges and velocities of targets), without requiring knowledge of the information sent by an active (transmit) BS to its users. The contributed method is formulated with basis on the covariance of received signals, and under a generalized doubly-dispersive channel model compatible with most of the waveforms typically considered for ISAC, such as orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), orthogonal time frequency space (OTFS) and affine frequency division multiplexing (AFDM). The original non-convex problem, which includes an $\ell_0$-norm regularization term in order to mitigate clutter, is solved not by relaxation to an $\ell_1$-norm, but by introducing an arbitrarily-tight approximation then relaxed via fractional programming (FP). Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed method approaches that of an ideal system with perfect knowledge of the transmit signal covariance with an increasing number of transmit frames.

Quantum Speedup of the Dispersion and Codebook Design Problems

We propose new formulations of max-sum and max-min dispersion problems that enable solutions via the Grover adaptive search (GAS) quantum algorithm, offering quadratic speedup. Dispersion problems are combinatorial optimization problems classified as NP-hard, which appear often in coding theory and wireless communications applications involving optimal codebook design. In turn, GAS is a quantum exhaustive search algorithm that can be used to implement full-fledged maximum-likelihood optimal solutions. In conventional naive formulations however, it is typical to rely on a binary vector spaces, resulting in search space sizes prohibitive even for GAS. To circumvent this challenge, we instead formulate the search of optimal dispersion problem over Dicke states, an equal superposition of binary vectors with equal Hamming weights, which significantly reduces the search space leading to a simplification of the quantum circuit via the elimination of penalty terms. Additionally, we propose a method to replace distance coefficients with their ranks, contributing to the reduction of the number of qubits. Our analysis demonstrates that as a result of the proposed techniques a reduction in query complexity compared to the conventional GAS using Hadamard transform is achieved, enhancing the feasibility of the quantum-based solution of the dispersion problem.