Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces for Multiuser Beamforming in the Wave Domain
Jiancheng An, Marco Di Renzo, Merouane Debbah, Chau Yuen

TL;DR
This paper introduces a stacked intelligent metasurface (SIM) for multiuser beamforming in wireless communications, enabling low-cost, energy-efficient, and fast wave-domain processing that surpasses traditional digital methods.
Contribution
It proposes a novel multilayer SIM structure for wave-domain beamforming, reducing hardware costs, energy consumption, and delay in multiuser MIMO systems.
Findings
Significant reduction in hardware cost and energy use.
Enhanced sum rate performance compared to benchmarks.
Substantially decreased precoding delay.
Abstract
Reconfigurable intelligent surface has recently emerged as a promising technology for shaping the wireless environment by leveraging massive low-cost reconfigurable elements. Prior works mainly focus on a single-layer metasurface that lacks the capability of suppressing multiuser interference. By contrast, we propose a stacked intelligent metasurface (SIM)-enabled transceiver design for multiuser multiple-input single-output downlink communications. Specifically, the SIM is endowed with a multilayer structure and is deployed at the base station to perform transmit beamforming directly in the electromagnetic wave domain. As a result, an SIM-enabled transceiver overcomes the need for digital beamforming and operates with low-resolution digital-to-analog converters and a moderate number of radio-frequency chains, which significantly reduces the hardware cost and energy consumption, while…
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Taxonomy
TopicsAdvanced Wireless Communication Technologies · Antenna Design and Analysis · Advanced Antenna and Metasurface Technologies
