Tri-Hybrid Beamforming Design for ISAC Systems with Reconfigurable Antennas

Abstract

Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) systems require efficient beamforming architectures to jointly support communication and sensing functionalities. To reduce hardware overhead, Hybrid Beamforming (HBF) has been widely studied and shown to achieve performance close to fully digital beamforming under practical hardware constraints. As a promising evolution, Reconfigurable Antenna (RA) technologies have recently emerged to further enhance beamforming Degrees of Freedom (DoFs) by dynamically reconfiguring antenna Electromagnetic(EM) characteristics, yet their integration into ISAC systems remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we investigate an RA-assisted ISAC system and develop a decoupled Triple-Hybrid Beamforming (Tri-HBF) framework that alternatively optimizes digital, analog, and EM beamformers to maximize the communication rate and sensing Signal-to-Clutter-plus-NoiseRatio (SCNR). For both Single-user Single-target (SUST) and Multiple-user Multiple-target (MUMT) scenarios, we first transform the original fractional objectives into fraction-free ones via methods tailored to their respective structures. The resulting problems are then solved via alternating optimization over different variable blocks. Closed-form updates are derived for all variables except the EM beamforming subproblem in the MUMT scenario. To further reduce the complexity introduced by Semidefinite Relaxation (SDR) in EM beamforming, we propose a low-complexity iterative approach across antennas with closed-form updates. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly outperforms benchmark designs with conventional omnidirectional and directional antennas, achievingalmost 100% improvement in spectrum efficiency and 62.5% reduction in antenna overhead, thereby unveiling the