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A New Old Idea: Beam-Steering Reflectarrays for Efficient Sub-THz Multiuser MIMO
  • Krishan Kumar Tiwari ,
  • Giuseppe Caire
Krishan Kumar Tiwari
Technical University of Berlin, Technical University of Berlin

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Giuseppe Caire
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Abstract

This paper presents a novel, power- and hardware-efficient, multiuser, multibeam RIS (Reflective Intelligent Surface) architecture for multiuser MIMO, especially suited to operate in very high frequency bands (e.g., high mmWave and sub-THz), where channels are typically sparse in the beamspace and line-of-sight (LOS)  is the dominant component. The key module is formed by an active multiantenna feeder (AMAF) with a small number of active antennas, placed in the near field of a RIS with a much larger number of passive controllable reflecting elements. We propose a pragmatic approach to obtain a steerable beam with high gain and very low sidelobes. Then K independently controlled beams can be achieved by closely stacking K such AMAF-RIS modules. Our analysis includes the mutual interference between the modules and the fact that, due to the delay difference of propagation through the AMAF-RIS structure, the resulting channel matrix is frequency selective even in the presence of pure LOS propagation. We consider a 3D geometry and show that “beam focusing” is in fact possible (and much more effective in terms of coverage) also in the far-field, by creating spotbeams with limited footprint both in angle and in range. Our results show that: 1)  simple RF beamforming without computationally expensive baseband digital multiuser precoding is sufficient to practically eliminate multiuser interference when the users are chosen with sufficient angular/range separation, thanks to the extremely low sidelobes of the proposed module; 2) the impact of beam pointing errors with standard deviation as large as 2.5 deg and RIS quantized phase-shifters with quantization bits > 2 is essentially negligible; 3) The proposed architecture is more power efficient and much simpler from a hardware implementation viewpoint than standard RF beamforming active arrays with the same beamforming performance. As a side result, we show also that the array gain of the proposed AMAF-RIS structure grows linearly with the RIS aperture, in line with classical results for standard reflector antennas.