Active RISs: Signal Modeling, Asymptotic Analysis, and Beamforming Design

TL;DR

This paper introduces active RISs that amplify signals to overcome the limitations of passive RISs, demonstrating significant capacity gains through modeling, optimization, and real-world testing.

Contribution

It presents the concept, signal modeling, and practical implementation of active RISs, showing their advantage over passive RISs in wireless systems.

Findings

Active RISs achieve a 62% sum-rate gain in simulations.

Passive RISs only provide about 3% gain.

Field tests validate the significant performance improvement of active RISs.

Abstract

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have emerged as a candidate technology for future 6G networks. However, due to the "multiplicative fading" effect, the existing passive RISs only achieve a negligible capacity gain in environments with strong direct links. In this paper, the concept of active RISs is studied to overcome this fundamental limitation. Unlike the existing passive RISs that reflect signals without amplification, active RISs can amplify the reflected signals via amplifiers integrated into their elements. To characterize the signal amplification and incorporate the noise introduced by the active components, we verify the signal model of active RISs through the experimental measurements on a fabricated active RIS element. Based on the verified signal model, we formulate the sum-rate maximization problem for an active RIS aided multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) system and a joint transmit precoding and reflect beamforming algorithm is proposed to solve this problem. Simulation results show that, in a typical wireless system, the existing passive RISs can realize only a negligible sum-rate gain of 3%, while the active RISs can achieve a significant sum-rate gain of 62%, thus overcoming the "multiplicative fading" effect. Finally, we develop a 64-element active RIS aided wireless communication prototype, and the significant gain of active RISs is validated by field test.