Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Enhanced Wireless Localization: Phase Optimization for Malicious Interference Mitigation

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have merged as important enabling technologies for localization coverage extension and localization accuracy improvement under signal blockage and malicious interference conditions. However, most existing works assume known locations of jammers, which is generally impractical in real-world networks. To overcome this challenge, we propose a novel RIS-enhanced wireless localization framework against malicious interference with the support of either narrowband or orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) pilot signals. A two-stage anti-jamming localization approach is developed to first estimate the unknown channel and signal information of the jammer and then localize the user’s position by eliminating the jamming signal. More importantly, we utilize the full potential of RIS to improve localization accuracy by optimizing the phase shift profile during the iterative process. Extensive simulation results demonstrate the commendable performance of our proposed framework, which can not only mitigate the jamming effect but also achieve better localization accuracy, offering a good reference for future heterogeneous and complex wireless networks.