Performance Evaluation of Dynamic Metasurface Antennas: Impact of Insertion Losses and Coupling

TL;DR

This paper assesses the performance of dynamic metasurface antennas in multi-user MIMO systems, highlighting how electromagnetic effects like insertion losses and coupling influence system performance and optimization.

Contribution

It introduces an electromagnetic model for DMAs, formulates a zero-forcing optimization problem, and compares performance with traditional MIMO systems considering electromagnetic phenomena.

Findings

Insertion losses significantly affect MIMO performance.

Mutual coupling impacts the effectiveness of DMA-based systems.

The proposed model enables better optimization of DMA configurations.

Abstract

This paper evaluates the performance of multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems in which the base station is equipped with a dynamic metasurface antenna (DMA). Due to the physical implementation of DMAs, conventional models widely-used in MIMO are no longer valid, and electromagnetic phenomena such as mutual coupling, insertion losses and reflections inside the waveguides need to be considered. Hence, starting from a recently proposed electromagnetic model for DMAs, we formulate a zero-forcing optimization problem, yielding an unconstrained objective function with known gradient. The performance is compared with that of full-digital and hybrid massive MIMO, focusing on the impact of insertion losses and mutual coupling.