Deep-Unfolded Wideband ISAC Beamforming for DMA Under Frequency-Selective Lorentzian Model
For wireless system designers, this work addresses a practical bottleneck in wideband ISAC with DMAs, offering a more accurate model and faster optimization.
The paper tackles wideband ISAC beamforming for DMAs under a frequency-selective Lorentzian model, achieving 20% performance improvement over frequency-flat models and 20-fold faster convergence with up to 7% better objective value via deep-unfolded PGA.
Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC), empowered by dynamic metasurface antennas (DMAs), has emerged as a promising paradigm for next-generation wireless networks. However, existing DMA-based designs commonly rely on the frequency-flat response model for DMA elements, which is accurate only in narrowband scenarios and can cause significant phase and magnitude mismatches in wideband and ultra-wideband systems. This paper investigates a DMA-based wideband ISAC system under a frequency-selective Lorentzian response model, which accurately captures the frequency-dependent behavior of DMA elements. We aim to jointly balance the aggregate signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) of communication users and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the radar target. To this end, we first develop an alternating optimization framework based on projected gradient ascent (PGA), deriving closed-form gradients of the objective function with respect to the digital beamforming vectors, resonance frequencies, and damping factors under the frequency-selective Lorentzian DMA model. We then propose an unfolded PGA architecture that preserves the interpretability of model-based optimization while learning key hyperparameters to accelerate convergence. Simulation results show that the frequency-selective Lorentzian model improves performance by approximately 20\% over its frequency-flat approximation. Moreover, deep-unfolded PGA achieves up to 20-fold faster convergence and improves the objective value by up to 7\% compared with PGA-based benchmarks.