LoS and beyond LoS localization and sensing assisted by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS)

In this talk, we will show how RIS can help us solve localization and sensing problems that were fundamentally impossible. We start from the standard 3 base station setup in 4G and 5G, via multipath exploitation with a single base station, to RIS-aided localization with and without LoS. We show that the power of RIS lies in the fact that it provides a new location and orientation reference, provides new type of measurements (in both far-field and in near-field), and that they are automatically synchronized by the existing infrastructure. In addition, we demonstrate how extensions to multi-RIS scenarios are possible by the design of coordinated RIS encoding.