The emergence of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) enables us to establish programmable radio wave propagation that caters for wireless communications, via employing low-cost passive reflecting units. This work studies the non-trivial tradeoff between energy efficiency (EE) and spectral efficiency (SE) in multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) uplink communications aided by a RIS equipped with discrete phase shifters. For reducing the required signaling overhead and energy consumption, our transmission strategy design is based on the partial channel state information (CSI), including the statistical CSI between the RIS and user terminals (UTs) and the instantaneous CSI between the RIS and the base station. To investigate the EE-SE tradeoff, we develop a framework for the joint optimization of UTs' transmit precoding and RIS reflective beamforming to maximize a performance metric called resource efficiency (RE). For the design of UT's precoding, it is simplified into the design of UTs' transmit powers with the aid of the closed-form solutions of UTs' optimal transmit directions. To avoid the high complexity in computing the nested integrals involved in the expectations, we derive an asymptotic deterministic objective expression. For the design of the RIS phases, an iterative mean-square error minimization approach is proposed via capitalizing on the homotopy, accelerated projected gradient, and majorization-minimization methods. Numerical results illustrate the effectiveness and rapid convergence rate of our proposed optimization framework.

While massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has achieved tremendous success in both theory and practice, it faces a crisis of sharp performance degradation in moderate or high-mobility scenarios (e.g., 30 km/h), due to the breach of uplink-downlink channel duality. Such a “curse of mobility” has spurred the research on channel prediction in high-mobility scenarios. Instead of predicting channel response matrix in the space-frequency domain, we investigate it in the angle-delay domain by utilizing the high angle-delay resolution of wideband massive MIMO systems. Specifically, we study the general angle-delay domain channel characterization and obtain that: 1) the correlations between the angle-delay domain channel response matrix (ADCRM) elements are decoupled significantly; 2) when the number of antennas and bandwidth are limited, the decoupling is insufficient and residual correlations between the neighboring ADCRM elements exist. Then focusing on the ADCRM, we propose two channel prediction methods: a spatio-temporal autoregressive (ST-AR) model-driven unsupervised-learning method and a deep learning (DL) based data-driven supervised-learning method. While the model-driven method provides a principled way for channel prediction, the data-driven method is generalizable to various channel scenarios. In particular, ST-AR exploits the residual spatio-temporal correlations of the channel element with its most neighboring elements, and DL realizes element-wise angle-delay domain channel prediction utilizing a complex-valued neural network (CVNN). Simulation results under the 3GPP non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios indicate that, compared to the state-of-the-art Prony-based angular-delay domain (PAD) prediction method, both the proposed ST-AR and the CVNN-based channel prediction methods can enhance the channel prediction accuracy.

Future wireless communications are largely inclined to deploy massive numbers of antennas at the base stations (BSs) by leveraging cost- and energy-efficient as well as environmentally friendly antenna arrays. The emerging technology of dynamic metasurface antennas (DMAs) is promising to realize such massive antenna arrays with reduced physical size, hardware cost, and power consumption. The goal of this paper is the optimization of the energy efficiency (EE) performance of DMAassisted massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) wireless communications. Focusing on the uplink, we propose an algorithmic framework for designing the transmit precoding of each multi-antenna user and the DMA tuning strategy at the BS to maximize the EE performance, considering the availability of either instantaneous or statistical channel state information (CSI). Specifically, the proposed framework is shaped around Dinkelbach's transform, alternating optimization, and deterministic equivalent methods. In addition, we obtain a closed-form solution to the optimal transmit signal directions for the statistical CSI case, which simplifies the corresponding transmission design for the multiple-antenna case. Our numerical results verify the good convergence behavior of the proposed algorithms, and showcase the considerable EE performance gains of the DMAassisted massive MIMO transmissions over the baseline schemes.

Extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) constitutes the design trend for base stations of future wireless communication systems, being capable of offering pencil-like beamforming that confronts path loss in an energy-efficient manner. However, wideband wireless applications with XL-MIMO antenna arrays are usually subject to near-field signal propagation conditions, frequency selectivity, and the spatial-wideband effect, whose ignorance in the beamforming optimization process will severely degrade the achievable performance. In this paper, we present an algorithmic framework for designing near-field reception beamforming of wideband multi-user XL-MIMO systems realized with holographic metasurface-based antenna arrays (HMAs). We first present a spherical-wave-propagation channel model, including the near-field effect, frequency selectivity, as well as the spatial-wideband effect. Based on this model, we formulate an HMA-based reception beamforming optimization problem for the uplink of multi-user XL-MIMO communications, whose optimal solution is challenging to obtain due to the nonlinear coupling between the high-dimensional analog combining weights and the digital combiner. To efficiently address the proposed framework via a convergent iterative approach, the considered sum-rate design objective is transformed into a sum-mean-square-error-minimization one. Our extensive numerical investigations showcase that the proposed HMA-based combining scheme can effectively deal with the practical effects under investigation, achieving a higher sum rate than conventional phase-shifter-based hybrid analog and digital combiners having the same antenna aperture.

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is promising for low earth orbit (LEO) satellite communications due to the potential in enhancing the spectral efficiency. However, the conventional fully digital precoding architectures might lead to high implementation complexity and energy consumption. In this paper, hybrid analog/digital precoding solutions are developed for the downlink operation in LEO massive MIMO satellite communications, by exploiting the slow-varying statistical channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter. First, we formulate the hybrid precoder design as an energy efficiency (EE) maximization problem by considering both the continuous and discrete phase shift networks for implementing the analog precoder. The cases of both the fully and the partially connected architectures are considered. Since the EE optimization problem is nonconvex, it is in general difficult to solve. To make the EE maximization problem tractable, we apply a closed-form tight upper bound to approximate the ergodic rate. Then, we develop an efficient algorithm to obtain the fully digital precoders. Based on which, we further develop two different efficient algorithmic solutions to compute the hybrid precoders for the fully and the partially connected architectures, respectively. Simulation results show that the proposed approaches achieve significant EE performance gains over the existing baselines, especially when the discrete phase shift network is employed for analog precoding.

This paper considers the application of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) (a.k.a. intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs)) to assist multiuser multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) uplink transmission from several multi-antenna user terminals (UTs) to a multi-antenna base station (BS). For reducing the signaling overhead, only partial channel state information (CSI), including the instantaneous CSI between the RIS and the BS as well as the slowly varying statistical CSI between the UTs and the RIS, is exploited in our investigation. In particular, an optimization framework is proposed for jointly designing the transmit covariance matrices of the UTs and the RIS phase shift matrix to maximize the system global energy efficiency (GEE) with partial CSI. We first obtain closed-form solutions for the eigenvectors of the optimal transmit covariance matrices of the UTs. Then, to facilitate the design of the transmit power allocation matrices and the RIS phase shifts, we derive an asymptotically deterministic equivalent of the objective function with the aid of random matrix theory. We further propose a suboptimal algorithm to tackle the GEE maximization problem with guaranteed convergence, capitalizing on the approaches of alternating optimization, fractional programming, and sequential optimization. Numerical results substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed approach as well as the considerable GEE gains provided by the RIS-assisted transmission scheme over the traditional baselines.