Joint Beamforming and Reflecting Design in Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided Multi-User Communication Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a low-complexity algorithm for joint beamforming and reflecting design in RIS-assisted multi-user systems, optimizing sum rate with practical channel estimation, verified by simulations.

Contribution

It proposes a fractional programming-based joint optimization algorithm that reduces complexity and extends to imperfect CSI scenarios.

Findings

Algorithm achieves higher sum rate than benchmarks.

Low complexity due to problem decomposition and closed-form solutions.

Effective under practical channel estimation conditions.

Abstract

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) provides a promising way to build the programmable wireless transmission environments in the future. Owing to the large number of reflecting elements used at the RIS, joint optimization for the active beamforming at the transmitter and the passive reflector at the RIS is usually complicated and time-consuming. To address this problem, this paper proposes a low-complexity joint beamforming and reflecting algorithm based on fractional programing (FP). Specifically, we first consider a RIS-aided multi-user communication system with perfect channel state information (CSI) and formulate an optimization problem to maximize the sum rate of all users. Since the problem is nonconvex, we decompose the original problem into three disjoint subproblems. By introducing favorable auxiliary variables, we derive the closed-form expressions of the beamforming vectors and reflecting matrix in each subproblem, leading to a joint beamforming and reflecting algorithm with low complexity. We then extend our approach to handle the case when transmitter-RIS and RIS-receiver channels are not perfect and develop corresponding low-complexity joint beamforming and reflecting algorithm with practical channel estimation. Simulation results have verified the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms as compared to various benchmark schemes.