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Stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs) are capable of emulating reconfigurable physical neural networks by utilizing electromagnetic (EM) waves as carriers. They can also perform various complex computational and signal processing tasks. An SIM is constructed by densely integrating multiple metasurface layers, each consisting of a large number of small meta-atoms that can control the EM waves passing through it. In this paper, we harness an SIM for two-dimensional (2D) direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation. In contrast to conventional designs, an advanced SIM in front of a receiver array can be designed to automatically compute the 2D discrete Fourier transform (DFT) as the incident waves propagate through it. As a result, a receiver array can directly observe the angular spectrum of the incoming signal, and it can estimate the DOA by simply using probes to detect the energy distribution on the receiver array. This avoids the need for power inefficient radio frequency chains. To enable an SIM to perform the 2D DFT in the wave domain, we formulate an optimization problem that minimizes the mean square error (MSE) between the SIM’s EM response and the 2D DFT matrix. Then, a gradient descent algorithm is customized for iteratively updating the phase shift applied by each meta-atom of the SIM. To further improve the DOA estimation accuracy, we configure the phase shifts of the input layer of the SIM to generate a set of 2D DFT matrices associated with orthogonal spatial frequency bins. Additionally, we analytically evaluate the performance of the proposed SIM-based DOA estimator by deriving a tight upper bound for the MSE. Extensive numerical simulations verify the capability of an optimized SIM to perform DOA estimation and corroborate the theoretical analysis. Specifically, we show that an SIM is capable of performing DOA estimation with an MSE of the order of $10^{-4}$ .

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technique to improve the performance of future wireless communication systems at low energy consumption. To reap the potential benefits of RIS-aided beamforming, it is vital to enhance the accuracy of channel estimation. In this paper, we consider an RIS-aided multiuser system with non-ideal reflecting elements, each of which has a phase-dependent reflecting amplitude, and we aim to minimize the mean-squared error (MSE) of the channel estimation by jointly optimizing the training signals at the user equipments (UEs) and the reflection pattern at the RIS. As examples the least squares (LS) and linear minimum MSE (LMMSE) estimators are considered. The considered problems do not admit simple solution mainly due to the complicated constraints pertaining to the non-ideal RIS reflecting elements. As far as the LS criterion is concerned, we tackle this difficulty by first proving the optimality of orthogonal training symbols and then propose a majorization-minimization (MM)-based iterative method to design the reflection pattern, where a semi-closed form solution is obtained in each iteration. As for the LMMSE criterion, we address the joint training and reflection pattern optimization problem with an MM-based alternating algorithm, where a closed-form solution to the training symbols and a semi-closed form solution to the RIS reflecting coefficients are derived, respectively. Furthermore, an acceleration scheme is proposed to improve the convergence rate of the proposed MM algorithms. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the performance advantages of our proposed joint training and reflection pattern designs.

This paper investigates the integration of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) into a secure multiuser massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system in the presence of transceiver hardware impairments (HWI), imperfect channel state information (CSI), and spatially correlated channels. We first introduce a linear minimum-mean-square error estimation algorithm for the aggregate channel by considering the impact of transceiver HWI and RIS phase-shift errors. Then, we derive a lower bound for the achievable ergodic secrecy rate in the presence of a multi-antenna eavesdropper when artificial noise (AN) is employed at the base station (BS). In addition, the obtained expressions of the ergodic secrecy rate are further simplified in some noteworthy special cases to obtain valuable insights. To counteract the effects of HWI, we present a power allocation optimization strategy between the confidential signals and AN, which admits a fixed-point equation solution. Our analysis reveals that a non-zero ergodic secrecy rate is preserved if the total transmit power decreases no faster than $1/N$ , where N is the number of RIS elements. Moreover, the ergodic secrecy rate grows logarithmically with the number of BS antennas M and approaches a certain limit in the asymptotic regime $N\rightarrow \infty $ . Simulation results are provided to verify the derived analytical results. They reveal the impact of key design parameters on the secrecy rate. It is shown that, with the proposed power allocation strategy, the secrecy rate loss due to HWI can be counteracted by increasing the number of low-cost RIS elements.

In this paper, we consider an active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to assist the multiuser downlink transmission in the presence of practical hardware impairments (HWI), including the HWI at the transceivers and the phase noise at the active RIS. The active RIS is deployed to amplify the incident signals to alleviate the multiplicative channel effect in conventional nearly passive RIS-aided wireless systems. We aim to maximize the sum rate through jointly designing the transmit beamforming at the base station (BS), the amplification factors and the phase shifts at the active RIS. To tackle this challenging optimization problem effectively, we decouple it into two tractable subproblems. Subsequently, each subproblem is transformed into a second order cone programming problem. The block coordinate descent framework is applied to tackle them, where the transmit beamforming and the reflection coefficients are alternately designed. In addition, another efficient algorithm is presented to reduce the computational complexity. Specifically, by exploiting the majorization-minimization method, each subproblem is reformulated into a tractable surrogate problem, whose closed-form solutions are obtained by Lagrange’s dual decomposition approach and the element-wise alternating sequential optimization method. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the developed algorithms, and reveal that the HWI significantly limit the system performance of active RIS-empowered wireless communications. Furthermore, an active RIS noticeably boosts the sum rate under the same total power budget as a nearly passive RIS.

In this work, we investigate a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided integrated sensing and communication scenario, where a base station (BS) communicates with multiple devices in a full-duplex mode, and senses the positions of these devices simultaneously. An RIS is assumed to be mounted on each device to enhance the reflected echoes. Meanwhile, the information of each device is passively transferred to the BS via reflection modulation. We aim to tackle the problem of joint localization and information retrieval at the BS. A grid based parametric model is constructed and the joint estimation problem is formulated as a compressive sensing problem. We propose a novel message-passing algorithm to solve the considered problem, and a progressive approximation method to reduce the computational complexity involved in the message passing. Moreover, an expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm is applied for tuning the grid parameters, hence mitigating the model mismatch problem. Finally, we analyze the efficacy of the proposed algorithm through the Bayesian Cramér-Rao bound. Numerical results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed scheme and the superior performance of the proposed EM-based message-passing algorithm.

Index modulation (IM) schemes for reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS)-assisted systems are envisioned as promising technologies for fifth-generation-advanced and sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication systems to enhance various system capabilities such as coverage area and network capacity. In this paper, we consider a receive diversity RIS-assisted wireless communication system employing IM schemes, namely, space-shift keying (SSK) with binary modulation and spatial modulation (SM) with $M$ -ary modulation for data transmission. The RIS lies in close proximity to the transmitter, and the transmitted data is subjected to a fading environment with a prominent line-of-sight component statistically modeled by a Rician distribution. A receiver structure based on a greedy detection rule is employed to select the receive diversity branch with the highest received signal energy for demodulation. The performance of the considered system is evaluated by obtaining a series-form expression for the probability of erroneous index detection (PED) of the considered target antenna using a characteristic function approach. In addition, closed-form and asymptotic expressions at high and low signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) for the bit error rate (BER) of the SSK-based system, and the SM-based system employing $M$ -ary phase-shift keying and $M$ -ary quadrature amplitude modulation schemes are derived. The dependencies of the system performance on various parameters are corroborated via numerical results. The asymptotic expressions and results of PED and BER at high and low SNR values lead to the observation of a performance saturation and the presence of an SNR value as a point of inflection, which is attributed to the greedy detector.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have attracted increasing interest from both academia and industry, thanks to their unique features on controlling electromagnetic (EM) waves. Although theoretical models for RIS-empowered communications have covered a variety of applications, yet, very few papers have investigated the modeling of real propagation characteristics. In this paper, we fill this gap by providing an empirical statistical channel model to describe the small-scale channel variations for an RIS-assisted broadband system at 2.6 GHz. Based on empirical channel measurements in outdoor, indoor and outdoor-to-indoor (O2I) environments, we compare and analyze the global, inter-cluster and intra-cluster parameters. Measurement results indicate that the deployment of an RIS with proper phase configurations can significantly improve the channel quality by enhancing the $K$-factor and reducing the time dispersion. The small-scale fading is well characterized by the proposed statistical model and empirical channel parameters. These results are essential for the design of emerging RIS-assisted wireless systems for future applications.

A challenge for real-time monitoring of biochemical processes, such as cells, is detection of biologically relevant molecules. This is due to the fact that spectroscopy methods for detection may perturb the cellular environment. One approach to overcome this problem is coupled microfluidic-spectroscopy, where a microfluidic output channel is introduced in order to observe biologically relevant molecules. This approach allows for non-passive spectroscopy methods, such as mass spectrometry, to identify the structure of molecules released by the cell. Due to the non-negligible length of the microfluidic channel, when a sequence of stimuli are applied to a cell it is not straightforward to determine which spectroscopy samples correspond to a given stimulus. In this paper, we propose a solution to this problem by taking a molecular communication (MC) perspective on the coupled microfluidic-spectroscopy system. In particular, assignment of samples to a stimulus is viewed as a synchronization problem. We develop two new algorithms for synchronization in this context and carry out a detailed theoretical and numerical study of their performance. Our results show improvements over maximum-likelihood synchronization algorithms in terms of detection performance when there are uncertainties in the composition of the microfluidic channel.

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) is an emerging technique for the next generation of communication systems. However, due to multiple performance metrics used for communication and sensing, the limited number of degrees-of-freedom (DoF) in optimizing ISAC systems poses a challenge. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) can introduce new DoF for beamforming in ISAC systems, thereby enhancing the performance of communication and sensing simultaneously. In this paper, we propose two optimization techniques for beamforming in RIS-assisted ISAC systems. The first technique is an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm based on the semidefinite relaxation (SDR) method and a one-dimension iterative (ODI) algorithm, which can maximize the radar mutual information (MI) while imposing constraints on the communication rates. The second technique is an AO algorithm based on the Riemannian gradient (RG) method, which can maximize the weighted ISAC performance metrics. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed schemes. The AO-SDR-ODI method is shown to achieve better communication and sensing performance, than the AO-RG method, at a higher complexity. It is also shown that the mean-squared-error (MSE) of the estimates of the sensing parameters decreases as the radar MI increases.

The rapid development of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology provides flexible communication services to terrestrial nodes. Energy efficiency is crucial to the deployment of UAVs, especially rotary-wing UAVs whose propulsion power is sensitive to the wind effect. In this paper, we first derive a three-dimensional (3D) generalised propulsion energy consumption model (GPECM) for rotary-wing UAVs under the consideration of stochastic wind modeling and 3D force analysis. Based on the GPECM, we study a UAV-enabled downlink communication system, where a rotary-wing UAV flies subject to stochastic wind disturbance and provides communication services for ground users (GUs). We aim to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the UAV by jointly optimizing the 3D trajectory and user scheduling among the GUs based on the GPECM. We formulate the problem as a stochastic optimization, which is difficult to solve due to the lack of real-time wind information. To address this issue, we propose an offline-based online adaptive (OBOA) design that is comprised of two phases, namely, an offline phase and an online phase. In the offline phase, we average the wind effect on the UAV by leveraging stochastic programming (SP) based on wind statistics; then, in the online phase, we further optimize the instantaneous velocity to adapt to the real-time wind. Simulation results show that the optimized trajectories of the UAV in both phases can better adapt to changes of the speed and direction of the wind, resulting in a higher EE compared with the wind-unaware scheme. In particular, the proposed OBOA design can be applied in the scenario with dramatic wind changes, and allows the UAV to adjust its velocity dynamically to achieve better performance in terms of EE.

This work addresses the topic of energy efficiency (EE) maximization in wireless networks aided by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), considering both active and nearly-passive RISs. Moreover, unlike available literature, the analysis considers that the RIS reflection constraints are not enforced separately on each reflecting element, but the RIS is characterized by a single reflection constraint that is jointly enforced on all the reflecting elements. This allows for a wider set of feasible RIS reflection matrices, which leads to better performance, which is theoretically analyzed. Then, two provably convergent energy efficiency maximization algorithms with polynomial complexity are developed, which optimize the reflection coefficients of the RIS, the mobile users’ transmit powers, and the linear filters at the base station. Numerical results are illustrated to quantify the performance of the proposed methods and identify the operating points in which active or nearly-passive RISs should be preferred from the energy efficiency standpoint.

Simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (STAR-RISs) have emerged as a promising technology to reconfigure the radio propagation environment in the full space. Prior works on STAR-RISs have mostly considered the energy splitting operation protocol, which has high hardware complexity in practice. Moreover, the full and instantaneous channel state information (CSI) is always assumed available for designing the STAR-RIS nearly passive beamforming, which, however, is practically difficult to obtain due to the large number of STAR-RIS elements. To address these issues, we study the mode switching design in STAR-RIS aided non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) communication systems. Moreover, two efficient two-timescale (TTS) transmission protocols are proposed for different channel setups to maximize the respective average achievable sum-rate. Specifically, 1) for the case of line-of-sight (LoS) dominant channels, we propose the beamforming-then-estimate (BTE) protocol, where the long-term STAR-RIS transmission and reflection coefficients are optimized based on the statistical CSI only, while the short-term power allocation at the base station (BS) is designed based on the estimated effective fading channels of all the users; 2) for the case of rich scattering environments, we propose an alternative partition-then-estimate (PTE) protocol, where the BS first determines the long-term STAR-RIS surface-partition strategy based on the path-loss information only, with each subsurface being assigned to one user; and then the BS estimates the instantaneous subsurface channels associated with the users and designs its power allocation and STAR-RIS phase-shifts accordingly. For the two proposed transmission protocols, we further propose efficient algorithms to solve the respective long-term and short-term optimization problems. Moreover, we show that both proposed transmission protocols substantially reduce the channel estimation overhead as compared to the existing schemes based on full instantaneous CSI. Last, simulation results validate the superiority of our proposed transmission protocols as compared to various benchmarks. It is shown that the BTE protocol outperforms the PTE protocol when the number of STAR-RIS elements is large and/or the LoS channel components are dominant, and vice versa.

In reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided coherent communications, channel state information (CSI) is often assumed to be perfectly estimated at the receiver. However, perfect CSI cannot be available in practice. Furthermore, the complex and ever-changing channel makes the acquisition of accurate CSI often unaffordable because of the large overhead in transmitting pilot signals. Motivated by these considerations, a novel non-coherent RIS-aided joint index keying $M$ -ary differential chaos shift keying (RIS-JIK-MDCSK) system is proposed in this paper, where the receiver can retrieve information bits by performing non-coherent correlation demodulation without requiring CSI, thereby reducing the system complexity. In RIS-JIK-MDCSK, the states of the reference signal, RIS elements, and information-bearing subcarriers are jointly optimized to devise a joint index keying mechanism, where additional information bits are implicitly transmitted by these state indices, thus increasing the throughput and spectral efficiency. Furthermore, an effective joint index keying detection algorithm is proposed to recover the information bits. The analytical bit error rate (BER) of RIS-JIK-MDCSK is derived over a Rayleigh fading channel. Other evaluation metrics, including the throughput, spectral efficiency, and system complexity are also analyzed and compared against benchmark systems. Numerical simulations are performed to evaluate the superiority of RIS-JIK-MDCSK compared to existing systems.

In this paper, we propose a novel reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted wireless communication scheme which uses the concept of spatial modulation, namely RIS-assisted receive quadrature spatial modulation (RIS-RQSM). In the proposed RIS-RQSM system, the information bits are conveyed via both the indices of the two selected receive antennas and the conventional in-phase/quadrature (IQ) modulation. We propose a novel methodology to adjust the phase shifts of the RIS elements in order to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and at the same time to construct two separate PAM symbols at the selected receive antennas, as the in-phase and quadrature components of the desired IQ symbol. An energy-based greedy detector (GD) is implemented at the receiver to efficiently detect the received signal with minimal channel state information (CSI) via the use of an appropriately designed one-tap pre-equalizer. We also derive a closed-form upper bound on the average bit error probability (ABEP) of the proposed RIS-RQSM system. Then, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the ABEP in order to improve the performance of the system, which allows the GD to act as a near-optimal receiver. Extensive numerical results are provided to demonstrate the error rate performance of the system and to compare with that of a prominent benchmark scheme. The results verify the remarkable superiority of the proposed RIS-RQSM system over the benchmark scheme.