Paper detail

Passive Beamforming and Information Transfer Design for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces Aided Multiuser MIMO Systems

This paper investigates the passive beamforming and information transfer (PBIT) technique for the multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with the aid of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), where the RIS enhances the primary communication via passive beamforming and at the same time delivers additional information by the spatial modulation (which adjusts the on-off states of the reflecting elements). For the passive beamforming design, we propose to maximize the sum channel capacity of the RIS-aided multiuser MIMO channel and formulate the problem as a two-step stochastic program. A sample average approximation (SAA) based iterative algorithm is developed for the efficient passive beamforming design of the considered scheme. To strike a balance between complexity and performance, we then propose a simplified beamforming algorithm by approximating the stochastic program as a deterministic alternating optimization problem. For the receiver design, the signal detection at the receiver is a bilinear estimation problem since the RIS information is multiplicatively modulated onto the reflected signals of the reflecting elements. To solve this bilinear estimation problem, we develop a turbo message passing (TMP) algorithm in which the factor graph associated with the problem is divided into two modules: one for the estimation of the user signals and the other for the estimation of the RIS's on-off states. The two modules are executed iteratively to yield a near-optimal low-complexity solution. Furthermore, we extend the design of the multiuser MIMO PBIT scheme from single-RIS to multi-RIS, by leveraging the similarity between the single-RIS and multi-RIS system models. Extensive simulation results are provided to demonstrate the advantages of our passive beamforming and receiver designs.