Ali Gorcin

Sefa Kayraklik, Ali Fuat Sahin, Onur Salan et al.

The vision of a smart wireless factory (SWF) demands highly flexible, low-latency, and reliable connectivity that goes beyond conventional wireless solutions. Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-empowered communications, when integrated with the open radio access network (O-RAN) architectures, have emerged as a promising enabler to meet these challenging requirements. This article introduces the methodology for the orchestration of RIS with xApps (ORIX), bringing the RIS technology into the O-RAN ecosystem through xApp-based control for SWF environments. ORIX features three key components: an O-RAN-compliant RIS service model for dynamic configuration, an RIS channel simulator that supports 3GPP indoor factory models with multiple industrial scenarios, and practical RIS optimization strategies with finite-resolution control. Together, these elements provide a realistic end-to-end emulation platform for evaluating RIS placement, control, and performance in SWF environments prior to deployment. The presented case study demonstrates how ORIX enables the evaluation of achievable performance gains, exploration of trade-offs among key RIS design parameters, and identification of deployment strategies that balance system performance with practical implementation constraints. By bridging theoretical advances with industrial feasibility, ORIX lays the groundwork for RIS-assisted O-RAN networks to power next-generation wireless communication in industrial scenarios.

Zehra Yigit, Sefa Kayraklik, Ertugrul Basar et al.

The synergy between integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) unlocks novel applications and advanced services for next-generation wireless networks, yet also introduces new security challenges. In this study, a novel dual target-mounted RISs-assisted ISAC scheme is proposed, where a base station with ISAC capability performs sensing of two unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) targets, one of which is legitimate and the other is eavesdropper, while communicating with the users through an RIS mounted on the legitimate UAV target. The proposed scheme addresses dual security threats posed by a hostile UAV target: eavesdropping on legitimate user communications and random interference attacks launched by a malicious RIS mounted on this eavesdropper UAV target, aiming to disrupt secure transmissions. Moreover, malicious RIS interference is also optimized for a worst-case scenario, in which both the channel state information (CSI) and the transmit beamforming of the base station are assumed to be fully compromised by a malicious RIS-mounted eavesdropper UAV. A non-convex optimization problem maximizing the secrecy rate of the users is formulated, and a semi-definite relaxation (SDR)-based two-stage solution is developed to optimize the transmit beamforming matrix of the base station and the phase shift coefficients of the legitimate RIS. Extensive computer simulations are conducted to evaluate the robustness of the proposed solution under various system configurations. The proposed system's communication performance is assessed using the secrecy rate metric, while the sensing performance is evaluated through the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio and the Cramer-Rao bound (CRB) for angle-of-departure (AoD) estimation of the eavesdropper UAV target.

Sefa Kayraklik, Ibrahim Yildirim, Ertugrul Basar et al.

This paper presents reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided deep learning (DL)-based spectrum sensing for next-generation cognitive radios. To that end, the secondary user (SU) monitors the primary transmitter (PT) signal, where the RIS plays a pivotal role in increasing the strength of the PT signal at the SU. The spectrograms of the synthesized dataset, including the 4G LTE and 5G NR signals, are mapped to images utilized for training the state-of-art object detection approaches, namely Detectron2 and YOLOv7. By conducting extensive experiments using a real RIS prototype, we demonstrate that the RIS can consistently and significantly improve the performance of the DL detectors to identify the PT signal type along with its time and frequency utilization. This study also paves the way for optimizing spectrum utilization through RIS-assisted CR application in next-generation wireless communication systems.