RIS-Enabled Energy-Efficient ISAC for Vehicular Applications

By incorporating integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) into vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) networks, roadside units (RSUs) can support data transmission while providing additional sensing capabilities, thereby enabling intelligent transportation services. By deploying large-scale antenna arrays at RSU, the V2I network can realize more reliable connectivity and more accurate vehicle tracking by harnessing the significant beamforming gains provided by the enlarged antenna aperture. However, it is not energy efficient to realize such arrays using conventional phased arrays, which rely on numerous power-hungry phase shifters. To address this, this demo presents the first reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-based ISAC-empowered vehicular network prototype, which operates at sub-6 GHz band to be compatible with existing vehicular systems. The RIS has a low power consumption of 6.8W. Experimental results show that compared with the system without RIS, the proposed RIS-based prototype enables more accurate vehicle trajectory tracking with an average localization error of 0.11m and supports more robust data transmission, as evidenced by a 41.9% reduction in error vector magnitude (EVM). These results validate the effectiveness of the RIS-based ISAC system for supporting vehicular networks.