Modeling and Coverage Analysis of RIS-Assisted Integrated Sensing and Communication Networks

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has emerged as a promising technology to facilitate high-rate communications and super-resolution sensing, particularly operating in the millimeter wave (mmWave) band. However, the vulnerability of mmWave signals to blockages severely impairs ISAC capabilities and coverage. To tackle this, an efficient and low-cost solution is to deploy distributed reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) to construct virtual links between the base stations (BSs) and users in a controllable fashion. In this paper, we model the generalized RIS-assisted mmWave ISAC networks considering the blockage effect, and examine the beneficial impact of RISs on the coverage rate utilizing stochastic geometry. Based on the proposed beam patterns and user association policies, we derive the conditional coverage probability and ergodic rate of communication and sensing dual functions for two association cases, as well as the marginal coverage rate using the distance-dependent thinning method. Taking into account the coupling effect of ISAC dual functions within the same network topology, we further calculate the joint coverage probability of ISAC performance. Simulation results verify the accuracy of derived theoretical formulations, and illustrate the impact of the RIS aperture, blockage, BS and RIS densities on ISAC coverage rates, which provide valuable guidelines for the practical network deployment. Specifically, our results indicate the superiority of the RIS deployment with the density of 40 km<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${}^{-2}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> BSs, and that the joint coverage rate of ISAC performance exhibits potential growth from 62% to 97% with the deployment of RISs.