Investigation of Holographic Beamforming via Dynamic Metasurface Antennas in QoS Guaranteed Power Efficient Networks

TL;DR

This paper explores holographic beamforming with dynamic metasurface antennas to design power-efficient, QoS-guaranteed multi-user MISO networks, addressing unique physical constraints and comparing performance with traditional architectures.

Contribution

It introduces specialized optimization algorithms for DMA beamforming, incorporating wave-domain precoding and near-field channel modeling, advancing the design of power-efficient wireless networks.

Findings

DMA beamforming approaches approach optimal limits under certain conditions.

Performance gap increases with the number of users due to DoF limitations.

DMA can achieve significant power savings compared to traditional systems.

Abstract

This work focuses on designing a power-efficient network for Dynamic Metasurface Antennas (DMA)-aided multi-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) antenna systems. Power efficiency is achieved through holographic beamforming in a DMA-aided network, minimizing total transmission power while ensuring a guaranteed signal-to-noise-and-interference ratio (SINR) for multiple users in downlink. Unlike conventional MISO systems, which have well-explored beamforming solutions, DMA require specialized methods due to their unique physical constraints and wave-domain precoding capabilities. To achieve this, optimization algorithms relying on alternating optimization and semi-definite programming, are developed, including spherical-wave channel modelling of near-field communication. In this setup, the beamforming performance of DMA-aided precoding is analyzed in comparison to its optimal limits and traditional fully digital (FD) architectures, considering the effects of the Lorentzian constraints of metasurfaces and the degree of freedom (DoF) limitations due to a reduced number of RF chains. We demonstrate that the performance gap caused by DoF constraints becomes more significant as the number of users increases, highlighting the trade-offs of DMA in high-density wireless networks.