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arXiv · 2607.24374

Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces Assisted UAV Communications

Chandan Kumar Sheemar·Giovanni Iacovelli·Sourabh Solanki·Wali Ullah Khan·Symeon Chatzinotas
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Abstract

In this paper, we investigate an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system assisted by stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs), which enable programmable wave-domain signal processing through multiple cascaded metasurface layers. By shifting part of the beamforming functionality from the RF/digital domain to the electromagnetic domain, SIMs allow the realization of energy-efficient hybrid beamforming architectures suitable for aerial platforms. We formulate the joint design of digital precoding, SIM phase configuration, and UAV positioning for multi-user downlink sum-rate maximization. To solve the resulting non-convex problem, we develop an alternating optimization framework that guarantees monotonic improvement of the objective. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed SIM-assisted architecture significantly improves spectral efficiency while maintaining low hardware complexity, and highlight the impact of the number of metasurface layers and size of each layer on system performance.

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Chandan Kumar Sheemar, Giovanni Iacovelli, Sourabh Solanki, Wali Ullah Khan, Symeon Chatzinotas. 2026-07-27. Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces Assisted UAV Communications. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.24374

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