arXiv subjects

Aya Mostafa Ahmed

Publications and source records attributed to Aya Mostafa Ahmed.

10 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Unified Evaluation Methodology for AI-Native Integrated Sensing and Communication

Integrated Sensing and Communication (ISAC) couples radio sensing, data transmission, and control actions within a single closed-loop system. When Artificial Intelligence (AI)-driven policies adapt sensing and communication online across a variety of sensing tasks and objectives, end-to-end performance is shaped not only by waveform and channel conditions but also by inference latency, uncertainty, environmental dynamics, and hardware non-idealities, leading to fundamental trade-offs between sensing accuracy, communication reliability, and resource overhead. This manuscript presents a unified system architecture and evaluation methodology for AI-native ISAC, defined as ISAC in which learning-based agents adapt sensing, communication, and actuation policies online under uncertainty. We formalize the design space of closed-loop ISAC, propose a three-stage validation pipeline from bounds and feasibility analysis, through high-fidelity digital-twin simulation, to preliminary over-the-air validation, and provide a minimal reporting checklist that links technical Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) (e.g., data rate, SINR, target detection, parameter estimation, track quality, localization error, outage, latency, overhead, and energy per decision) to application-level Key Value Indicators (KVIs) (e.g., availability and mission effectiveness). Two representative instantiations, specifically Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-based outdoor and Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS)-enabled indoor coverage extensions, are used to illustrate how to structure reproducible baselines and comparable evidence across heterogeneous deployments, helping bridge the gap between theoretical ISAC gains and deployment-ready performance claims.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2025

Hardware-Efficient Cognitive Radar: Multi-Target Detection with RL-Driven Transmissive RIS

Cognitive radar has emerged as a key paradigm for next-generation sensing, enabling adaptive, intelligent operation in dynamic and complex environments. Yet, conventional cognitive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radars offer strong detection performance but suffer from high hardware complexity and power demands. To overcome these limitations, we develop a reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework that leverages a transmissive reconfigurable intelligent surface (TRIS) for adaptive beamforming. A state-action-reward-state-action (SARSA) agent tunes TRIS phase shifts to improve multi-target detection in low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions while operating with far fewer radio frequency (RF) chains. Simulations confirm that the proposed TRIS-RL radar matches or, for large number of elements, even surpasses MIMO performance with reduced cost and energy requirements.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

Towards Smarter Sensing: 2D Clutter Mitigation in RL-Driven Cognitive MIMO Radar

Motivated by the growing interest in integrated sensing and communication for 6th generation (6G) networks, this paper presents a cognitive Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) radar system enhanced by reinforcement learning (RL) for robust multitarget detection in dynamic environments. The system employs a planar array configuration and adapts its transmitted waveforms and beamforming patterns to optimize detection performance in the presence of unknown two-dimensional (2D) disturbances. A robust Wald-type detector is integrated with a SARSA-based RL algorithm, enabling the radar to learn and adapt to complex clutter environments modeled by a 2D autoregressive process. Simulation results demonstrate significant improvements in detection probability compared to omnidirectional methods, particularly for low Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) targets masked by clutter.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2024

RIS-Aided Bistatic Radar for Rapid NLOS Sensing in the Teraharetz Band

In this paper, we investigate a non-lineof-sight (NLOS) sensing problem at terahertz frequencies. To be able to observe the targets shadowed by a blockage, we propose a method using reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS). We employ a bistatic radar system and scan the obstructed area with RIS using hierarchical codebooks (HCB). Moreover, we propose an iterative maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) scheme to yield the optimum sensing accuracy, converging to Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB). We take band-specific effects such as diffraction and beam squint into account and show that these effects are relevant factors affecting localization performance in RIS-employed radar setups. The results show that under NLOS conditions, the system can still localize all the targets with very good accuracy using the RIS. The initial estimates obtained by the HCBs can provide centimeter-level accuracy, and when the optimal performance is needed, at the cost of a few extra transmissions, the proposed iterative MLE method improves the accuracy to sub-millimeter accuracy, yielding the position error bound.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2023

Resilient Sparse Array Radar with the Aid of Deep Learning

In this paper, we address the problem of direction of arrival (DOA) estimation for multiple targets in the presence of sensor failures in a sparse array. Generally, sparse arrays are known with very high-resolution capabilities, where N physical sensors can resolve up to $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$ uncorrelated sources. However, among the many configurations introduced in the literature, the arrays that provide the largest hole-free co-array are the most susceptible to sensor failures. We propose here two machine learning (ML) methods to mitigate the effect of sensor failures and maintain the DOA estimation performance and resolution. The first method enhances the conventional spatial smoothing using deep neural network (DNN), while the second one is an end-to-end data-driven method. Numerical results show that both approaches can significantly improve the performance of MRA with two failed sensors. The data-driven method can maintain the performance of the array with no failures at high signal-tonoise ratio (SNR). Moreover, both approaches can even perform better than the original array at low SNR thanks to the denoising effect of the proposed DNN

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Deep Learning for DOA Estimation in MIMO Radar Systems via Emulation of Large Antenna Arrays

We present a MUSIC-based Direction of Arrival (DOA) estimation strategy using small antenna arrays, via employing deep learning for reconstructing the signals of a virtual large antenna array. Not only does the proposed strategy deliver significantly better performance than simply plugging the incoming signals into MUSIC, but surprisingly, the performance is also better than directly using an actual large antenna array with MUSIC for high angle ranges and low test SNR values. We further analyze the best choice for the training SNR as a function of the test SNR, and observe dramatic changes in the behavior of this function for different angle ranges.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2021

A Reinforcement Learning based approach for Multi-target Detection in Massive MIMO radar

This paper considers the problem of multi-target detection for massive multiple input multiple output (MMIMO) cognitive radar (CR). The concept of CR is based on the perception-action cycle that senses and intelligently adapts to the dynamic environment in order to optimally satisfy a specific mission. However, this usually requires a priori knowledge of the environmental model, which is not available in most cases. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) based algorithm for cognitive multi-target detection in the presence of unknown disturbance statistics. The radar acts as an agent that continuously senses the unknown environment (i.e., targets and disturbance) and consequently optimizes transmitted waveforms in order to maximize the probability of detection ($P_\mathsf{D}$) by focusing the energy in specific range-angle cells (i.e., beamforming). Furthermore, we propose a solution to the beamforming optimization problem with less complexity than the existing methods. Numerical simulations are performed to assess the performance of the proposed RL-based algorithm in both stationary and dynamic environments. The RL based beamforming is compared to the conventional omnidirectional approach with equal power allocation and to adaptive beamforming with no RL. As highlighted by the proposed numerical results, our RL-based beamformer outperforms both approaches in terms of target detection performance. The performance improvement is even particularly remarkable under environmentally harsh conditions such as low SNR, heavy-tailed disturbance and rapidly changing scenarios.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Supervised Learning Based Super-Resolution DoA Estimation Utilizing Antenna Array Extrapolation

In this paper, we introduce a novel algorithm that can dramatically reduce the number of antenna elements needed to accurately predict the direction of arrival (DOA) for multiple input multiple output (MIMO) radar. The new proposed algorithm predicts the received signal of a large antenna setup using reduced number of antenna by using coupled dictionary learning. Hence, this enables the MIMO radar to resolve more paths, which could not be resolved by the fewer antennas. Specifically, we overcome the problem of inaccurate DOA estimation due to a small virtual array setup. For example, we can use dictionary learning to predict 100 virtual array elements using only 25. To evaluate our algorithm, we used multiple signal classification (MUSIC) as a DOA estimation technique to estimate the DOA for non coherent multiple targets. The results show that using the predicted received signal, the proposed algorithm could resolve all the targets in the scene, which could not been resolved using only the received signal from the reduced antenna setup.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Deep Autoencoders for DOA Estimation of Coherent Sources using Imperfect Antenna Array

In this paper a robust algorithm for DOA estimation of coherent sources in presence of antenna array imperfections is presented. We exploit the current advances of deep learning to overcome two of the most common problems facing the state of the art DOA algorithms (i.e. coherent sources and array imperfections). We propose a deep auto encoder (AE) that is able to correctly resolve coherent sources without the need of spatial smoothing, hence avoiding possible processing overhead and delays. Moreover, we assumed the presence of array imperfections in the received signal model such as mutual coupling, gain/ phase mismatches, and position errors. The deep AE is trained using the covariance matrix of the received signal, where it alleviates the effect of imperfections, and at the same time act as a filters for the coherent sources. The results show significant improvement compared to the methods used in the literature.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2020

Impact of Spatial Correlation in MIMO Radar

The impact of spatial correlation on mutual information (MI) is analyzed for MIMO radar. Unlike the work done in literature for statistical MIMO radar, we consider the spatial correlation of the target matrix elements to study the correlated MIMO radar performance. There is a trade-off between coherent processing gain in correlated MIMO radar and spatial diversity gain of target scatterers in uncorrelated MIMO radar. We address how the MI between the received signal and target channel matrix is affected by spatial correlation. Using majorization theory and the notion of Schur-convexity, we prove that MI has a changing behavior with respect to spatial correlation, where at low SNR, the MI is Schur-convex, i.e. showing increasing performance as correlation increases. However, this behavior changes at high SNR, since MI is Schur-concave at high SNR, hence it decreases as the spatial correlation increases. Moreover, we investigate the conditions for spatially uncorrelated MIMO radar. According to these conditions, as the operating frequency increases with respect to the target location and dimensions, the received paths become more uncorrelated. Hence, the setup with lower operating frequency (more correlated) performs better compared to the higher frequency setup at low SNR. However at high SNR, this behavior is reversed.

eess.SP↗