Joint Waveform Design and Passive Beamforming for RIS-Assisted Dual-Functional Radar-Communication System

Dual-functional radar-communication (DFRC) technique has been viewed as a promising component in the emerging platforms. When synthesizing the desired transmit beampattern, the degrees of freedom of waveform design is limited, which introduces high multi-user interference (MUI), thus degrading the communication performance. Inspired by the applications of the Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) in mitigating MUI, in this paper, we investigate joint waveform design and passive beamforming in RIS-assisted DFRC system. We first study the minimization of MUI under the strict beampattern constraint by jointly optimizing DFRC waveform and RIS phase shift matrix. To deal with the coupled variables, we propose an alternating algorithm based on manifold optimization. Subsequently, the trade-off between radar and communication performances is investigated. Simulation results show that for both cases of strict beampattern and trade-off design, with the help of RIS, the system throughput can be significantly improved. Moreover, compared with the scenario where no RIS is employed, the obtained beampattern matches with the target transmit beampattern better.