Target-Mounted Intelligent Reflecting Surface for Joint Location and Orientation Estimation

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been widely recognized as an efficient technique to reconfigure the electromagnetic environment in favor of wireless communication performance. In this paper, we propose a new application of IRS for device-free target sensing via joint location and orientation estimation. In particular, different from the existing works that use IRS as an additional anchor node for localization/sensing, we consider mounting IRS on the sensing target, whereby estimating the IRS's location and orientation as that of the target by leveraging IRS's controllable signal reflection. To this end, we first propose a tensor-based method to acquire essential angle information between the IRS and the sensing transmitter as well as a set of distributed sensing receivers. Next, based on the estimated angle information, we formulate two optimization problems to estimate the location and orientation of the IRS/target, respectively, and obtain the locally optimal solutions to them by invoking two iterative algorithms, namely, gradient descent method and manifold optimization. In particular, we show that the orientation estimation problem admits a closed-form solution in a special case that usually holds in practice. Furthermore, theoretical analysis is conducted to draw essential insights into the proposed sensing system design and performance. Simulation results verify our theoretical analysis and demonstrate that the proposed methods can achieve high estimation accuracy which is close to the theoretical bound.