arXiv · 2605.26634
Reliability-Constrained Blind Beam Alignment for Backscatter-MIMO mounted Target in Cluttered Multipath Channels
Abstract
Practical ISAC is constrained by static clutter and NLoS multipath, which obscure target-coupled echoes and induce spurious peaks for beam alignment. Existing receiver-side methods largely model targets as passive scatterers, limiting the structural separability of target echoes from the environment. This paper establishes a structural correspondence between these limitations and target-side Backscatter-MIMO responses: reflection modulation enables waveform-domain separation from unmodulated clutter, while retro-directional passive beamforming concentrates the tagged echo toward the BS-facing direction and suppresses NLoS-induced false-peak locking. To operationalize this correspondence, dual-end spatial locking is required to overcome cascaded backscatter loss and provide beam-domain angular information. We propose a downlink-triggered blind dual-end alignment protocol that jointly selects the BS and Backscatter-MIMO codeword indices from the tagged echo observed at the BS, without pilots, CSI feedback, or target synchronization. We further derive a clutter-aware remodulation waveform robust to fractional timing offsets and construct adjustable-width BS/Backscatter-MIMO codebooks via quadratic phase spoiling. For reliability characterization, we derive closed-form expressions for the coherence-averaged end-to-end success probability. The analysis shows that beam narrowing is not universally beneficial: in NLoS-dominated regimes, enlarging the array aperture may degrade alignment reliability. The optimal beamwidth is instead governed by cross-phase competition between discovery and alignment, yielding a nontrivial feasible region with an analytically characterized boundary. Simulations validate the analysis and demonstrate improved reliability-gated locked-link performance under strong clutter, severe NLoS multipath, and finite coherence time.
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Xuehui Dong, Kai Wan, Gui Zhou, Chen Shao, Miyu Feng, Robert Caiming Qiu. 2026-05-26. Reliability-Constrained Blind Beam Alignment for Backscatter-MIMO mounted Target in Cluttered Multipath Channels. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26634
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