Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Aided Amplitude- and Phase-Modulated Downlink Transmission

TL;DR

This paper introduces novel RIS-based amplitude and phase modulation schemes that enhance data transmission by controlling RIS element states and phases, outperforming existing methods in capacity and error probability, especially at high SNR.

Contribution

It proposes new RIS-aided amplitude and phase modulation schemes that utilize both ON-OFF states and phase shifts of RIS elements for improved communication performance.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art RIS-based PSK in capacity and error probability.

Effective in high SNR regions with finite resolution RIS phase shifts.

Utilizes coherent combining of propagation paths for enhanced signal design.

Abstract

New reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) based amplitude and phase modulation schemes are proposed as an evolution how the phase-only modulation schemes available in the literature. Explicitly, both the amplitude-phase shift keying (A-PSK) and quadrature amplitude-phase shift keying (QA-PSK) are conceived, where the RIS is assumed to be part of a transmitter to deliver information to the multi-antenna aided downlink receiver. In the proposed design, the RIS is partitioned into multiple blocks, and the information bits are conveyed by controlling both the ON-OFF state and the phase shift of the RIS elements in each block. Since the propagation paths spanning from each RIS block to the receiver can be coherently combined as a benefit of appropriately configuring the phase of the RIS elements, the received signal constellations can be designed by controlling both the ON-OFF pattern of the RIS blocks as well as the phase shift of the RIS elements. Both the theoretical analysis and the simulation results show that our proposed RIS-aided modulation schemes outperform the state-of-the-art RIS-based PSK modulation both in terms of its discrete-input-continuous-output memoryless channel (DCMC) capacity and its symbol error probability, especially in the high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) region, when considering realistic finite resolution RIS phase shifts.