STAR-RIS and NOMA-Assisted Integrated Sensing and Covert Communication Systems

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the covert communication performance and sensing performance of integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems enhanced by simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS). A novel non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) enabled covert framework is proposed, where the covert transmission can be enhanced by eliminating the interference of public signals and sensing signals at the covert user. The large system analytic estimation is employed to effectively decouple the correlation of the warden’s channel fading gains and derive a closed-form expression for the minimum average detection error probability of the warden. Both sensing and covert rate optimization problems are investigated through jointly designing base station transmit beamforming and STAR-RIS passive beamforming. To optimize sensing performance, we aim at minimizing the Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) while satisfying the covert rate requirement. Conversely, when maximizing the covert rate, the CRB is incorporated as a constraint in the sensing. To address these challenging optimization problems, an iterative algorithm based on penalty methods and semidefinite programming are proposed to obtain the transmit beamforming and the beamforming of STAR-RIS. Simulation results indicate that the CRB and covert rate of the proposed ISAC systems, assisted by STAR-RIS and NOMA, outperform the ISAC systems enhanced by orthogonal multiple access and conventional RIS.