arXiv subjects

Boya Di

Publications and source records attributed to Boya Di.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

RIS-Enabled Energy-Efficient ISAC for Vehicular Applications

By incorporating integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) into vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) networks, roadside units (RSUs) can support data transmission while providing additional sensing capabilities, thereby enabling intelligent transportation services. By deploying large-scale antenna arrays at RSU, the V2I network can realize more reliable connectivity and more accurate vehicle tracking by harnessing the significant beamforming gains provided by the enlarged antenna aperture. However, it is not energy efficient to realize such arrays using conventional phased arrays, which rely on numerous power-hungry phase shifters. To address this, this demo presents the first reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-based ISAC-empowered vehicular network prototype, which operates at sub-6 GHz band to be compatible with existing vehicular systems. The RIS has a low power consumption of 6.8W. Experimental results show that compared with the system without RIS, the proposed RIS-based prototype enables more accurate vehicle trajectory tracking with an average localization error of 0.11m and supports more robust data transmission, as evidenced by a 41.9% reduction in error vector magnitude (EVM). These results validate the effectiveness of the RIS-based ISAC system for supporting vehicular networks.

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arXiv2026

Holographic Beamforming for Semantic Communication

Holographic beamforming enabled by metamaterial antennas has been proposed to facilitate spatial multiplexing at low hardware cost and low power consumption. However, existing holographic beamforming schemes are mainly developed for conventional bit-communication systems, which have not considered semantic-level importance and thus cannot be directly applied to support semantic communication. Specifically, in conventional bit communication, all bits are treated as equally important. In contrast, in semantic communication, different semantic information contribute unequally to task completion and therefore has different degrees of importance, with more important information requiring higher transmission quality. Ignoring semantic importance in holographic beamforming causes mismatches between importance of semantic information and its received SNR, thus degrading performances. In this paper, we propose a semantic-importance-aware holographic beamforming scheme enabled by metamaterial antennas with tunable radiated amplitudes to support semantic communication. It is challenging to design semantic-aware holographic beamforming schemes due to non-trivial modeling of the impact of semantic importance and unique amplitude-controlled structures of holographic beamforming. To address this, we characterize the dependence of semantic communication performance on semantic importance and received SNR via data fitting, and design a semantic-aware holographic beamforming algorithm to ensure reliable delivery of highly important semantic information. Simulation results validate effectiveness of the proposed method.

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arXiv2026

Hybrid Digital and Analog Airy Beamforming for Near-Field Multi-User Communications

The demands for high data rates in 6G networks have driven the transition toward higher frequencies and larger antenna apertures, giving rise to the near-field communications. In the near-field region, spherical waves enable beam focusing to enhance the received power. However, high-frequency focused beams are highly susceptible to ubiquitous obstacles due to rectilinear trajectories. Particularly in multi-user communications with hybrid precoding, focused beamforming suffers from impaired spectral efficiency under potential multi-user link blockages. In this paper, we propose an Airy beamforming enabled multi-user transmission scheme. The near-field Airy wavefront with a bending trajectory is first developed to cope with the obstructed channels, possessing the dual capability of bypassing obstacles and concentrating energy. Moreover, a low-complexity Airy beamforming enabled multi-user communication scheme is designed. Specifically, Airy beams capable of circumventing obstacles and aligning with users are first obtained through hierarchical Airy beam training. Then, the selected Airy beams are leveraged to configure the analog beamformer to achieve multi-user obstacle-avoiding access without full channel state information acquisition. Finally, the digital beamformer is utilized to further mitigate inter-user interference. In simulations, the beam patterns demonstrate that the proposed Airy beamforming successfully circumvents blockages and aligns with multiple users. Across typical mmWave to THz bands, the proposed scheme outperforms conventional focused beamforming in terms of spectral efficiency.

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arXiv2026

Holographic Airy Beamforming: Curved Trajectory Optimization for Blockage-Resilient Terahertz Communications

Terahertz communication offers vast bandwidth for high-speed transmission in the 6G networks but faces severe blockage challenges in the near-field region due to large antenna arrays. To overcome the limitation that near-field focused beams are susceptible to obstacles, wavefront engineering is leveraged to generate an Airy beam that propagates along a parabolic trajectory to circumvent blockages. In this paper, we consider the reconfigurable holographic surface (RHS) as a potential solution for such precise wavefront engineering owing to its compact radiation element spacing being much smaller than half-wavelength. We reveal that the adjustable effective aperture of the RHS allows the parabolic offset to be located within the antenna aperture, which enhances the freedom in designing Airy beam trajectories. An analog beamforming method, named the holographic Airy beamforming scheme based on amplitude control, is then proposed to generate the curved beam that propagates along the desired trajectory. To maximize the received power of a blocked user, we develop a geometry-based trajectory optimization algorithm. Simulation results validate that, compared to traditional phase-controlled arrays with analog beamforming, the RHS can leverage its adjustable effective aperture to improve the received power of the blocked user by over 10 dB.

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arXiv2026

Holographic Surface Enabled Integrated Sensing and Communications

Integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) is an essential 6G capability for joint data transmission and environmental sensing. To support 6G scenarios with stringent ISAC performance requirements, existing massive-MIMO-based systems are expected to scale toward ultra-massive MIMO. However, this scaling incurs prohibitive cost and power consumption when realized using widely adopted phased arrays with complex phase shifters and feeding networks. Recently, holographic integrated sensing and communications (HISAC) has emerged as a promising paradigm to address this issue. It employs reconfigurable holographic surfaces (RHSs), a type of leaky-wave antenna, as a cost- and energy-efficient implementation of ultra-massive MIMO-based ISAC, and offers enhanced flexibility for ISAC beam synthesis through holographic beamforming. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive tutorial on HISAC, focusing on how RHS-enabled holographic beamforming can be exploited to jointly support communication and sensing under practical hardware constraints. We first introduce the fundamentals of RHSs and discuss the unique leakage power constraint of holographic beamforming. We then present a general optimization framework for HISAC and show how HISAC enhances joint communication and sensing, sensing-assisted communication, and communication-assisted sensing. We further present HISAC system implementations and experimental results. Finally, we outline promising research directions for HISAC, highlighting the potential of HISAC in advancing efficient, flexible, and high-performance ISAC networks.

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arXiv2026

Breaking Near-Field Communication Barriers: Focused, Curved, or Airy Beamforming?

To meet the requirements for high data rates and ubiquitous connectivity in 6G networks, higher frequencies and larger array apertures are employed to enhance spatial resolution and spectral efficiency. This evolution leads to an expansion of the near-field region, where spherical-wave focusing can significantly enhance received power. However, the pervasive presence of obstacles in near-field environments makes communication in obstructed scenarios a critical challenge, particularly for sensitive high-frequency links with high penetration losses. In this paper, we propose a new waveform, termed the near-field Airy beam, which is tailored to the amplitude and phase characteristics of obstructed near-field channels. By integrating non-uniform amplitude response with non-linear phase profile, the proposed Airy beam forms specific curved trajectories, energy distributions, and focal points, enabling energy concentration at the user even after circumventing obstacles. An Airy beamforming algorithm is also developed for hybrid beamformer architectures. Considering practical conditions with unknown obstacle and user locations, we design an Airy beam codebook and a low-overhead hierarchical search scheme to identify the optimal user-aligned beam. Simulation results demonstrate that in obstructed environments, the near-field Airy beam achieves a received power gain of over 3 dB compared to conventional waveforms like focused and curved beams, closely approaching the theoretical upper bound. Across the mmWave to THz bands and various obstacle dimensions, the proposed beam training scheme consistently outperforms traditional methods in terms of spectral efficiency while maintaining a comparable training overhead.

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arXiv2026

Tri-Hybrid Holographic Beamforming for Integrated Sensing and Communication

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) can perform both communication and sensing tasks using the same frequency band and hardware, making it a key technology for 6G. As a low-cost implementation for large-scale antenna arrays, reconfigurable holographic surfaces (RHSs) can be integrated into ISAC systems to realize the holographic ISAC paradigm, where enlarged radiation apertures achieve significant beamforming gains. In this paper, we investigate the tri-hybrid holographic ISAC framework, where the beamformer comprises digital, analog, and RHS-based electromagnetic (EM) layers. The analog layer employs a small number of phase shifters (PSs) to provide subarray-level phase control for the amplitude-modulated RHSs. Tri-hybrid beamforming provides a pathway for low-cost large-scale holographic ISAC. However, compared to conventional ISAC systems, it is challenging to achieve joint subarray-level phase control via PSs and element-level radiation amplitude control via RHSs for holographic ISAC. To address this, we present a tri-hybrid holographic ISAC scheme that minimizes sensing waveform error while satisfying the minimum user rate requirement. A joint optimization approach for PS phases and RHS amplitude responses is designed to address inter-layer coupling and distinct feasible regions. Theoretical analyses reveal that the optimized amplitude responses cluster near boundary values, i.e., 1-bit amplitude control, to reduce hardware and algorithmic complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme achieves a controllable performance trade-off between communication and sensing tasks. Measured RHS beam gain validates the enhancement of holographic beamforming through subarray-level phase shifting. Moreover, as the number of RHS elements increases, the proposed approach exceeds the performance of conventional hybrid beamforming while significantly reducing the number of PSs.

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arXiv2026

Achievable Degrees of Freedom Analysis and Optimization in Massive MIMO via Characteristic Mode Analysis

Massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) is esteemed as a critical technology in 6G communications, providing large degrees of freedom (DoF) to improve multiplexing gain. This paper introduces characteristic mode analysis (CMA) to derive the achievable DoF. Unlike existing works primarily focusing on the DoF of the wireless channel,the excitation and radiation properties of antennas are also involved in our DoF analysis, which influences the number of independent data streams for communication of a MIMO system. Specifically, we model the excitation and radiation properties of transceiver antennas using CMA to analyze the excitation and radiation properties of antennas. The CMA-based DoF analysis framework is established and the achievable DoF is derived. A characteristic mode optimization problem of antennas is then formulated to maximize the achievable DoF. A case study where the reconfigurable holographic surface (RHS) antennas are deployed at the transceiver is investigated, and a CMA-based genetic algorithm is later proposed to solve the above problem. By changing the characteristic modes electric field and surface current distribution of RHS, the achievable DoF is enhanced. Full-wave simulation verifies the theoretical analysis on the the achievable DoF and shows that, via the reconfiguration of RHS based on the proposed algorithm, the achievable DoF is improved.

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arXiv2025

Precoding-free Hierarchical Rate-Splitting Multiple Access via Stacked Intelligent Metasurface

Interference management is a central bottleneck in dense multi-antenna wireless networks. Therefore, in this study, we present a digital precoding-free hierarchical rate-splitting multiple access (HRSMA) architecture assisted by a stacked intelligent metasurface (SIM) to achieve high spectral efficiency and user fairness with reduced hardware complexity. In the proposed system, the base station performs only scalar power allocation, while a multi-layer SIM acts as a wave-domain processor that spatially separates users and mitigates interference via nonlinear wavefront reconfiguration. This design eliminates the need for digital or hybrid precoding, drastically reducing the baseband computations. A joint optimization problem is formulated to maximize the minimum user rate by jointly optimizing SIM phase shifts, power allocation, and user grouping. To efficiently solve the resulting non-convex problem, an alternating optimization algorithm is developed, combining simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation (SPSA) for SIM configuration and power control with clustering-based grouping refinement. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed SIM-aided HRSMA achieves substantial gains in both spectral efficiency and fairness compared to hybrid beamforming and non-precoding baselines. Specifically, SIM-aided HRSMA attains comparable or superior minimum rates with significantly fewer active antennas by exploiting the additional wave-domain degrees of freedom provided by multi-layer SIMs. These findings highlight the potential of SIM-aided HRSMA as a low-cost, energy-efficient, and scalable solution for beyond-6G networks.

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arXiv2025

Reconfigurable Holographic Surfaces and Near Field Communication for Non-Terrestrial Networks: Potential and Challenges

To overcome the challenges of ultra-low latency, ubiquitous coverage, and soaring data rates, this article presents a combined use of Near Field Communication (NFC) and Reconfigurable Holographic Surfaces (RHS) for Non-Terrestrial Networks (NTN). A system architecture has been presented, which shows that the integration of RHS with NTN platforms such as satellites, High Altitute Platform Stations (HAPS), and Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAV) can achieve precise beamforming and intelligent wavefront control in near-field regions, enhancing Energy Efficiency (EE), spectral utilization, and spatial resolution. Moreover, key applications, challenges, and future directions have been identified to fully adopt this integration. In addition, a use case analysis has been presented to improve the EE of the system in a public safety use case scenario, further strengthening the UAV-RHS fusion.

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arXiv2025

Holographic Beamforming for Integrated Sensing and Communication with Mutual Coupling Effects

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is envisioned as a key technology in 6G networks, owing to its potential for high spectral and cost efficiency. As a promising solution for extremely large-scale arrays, reconfigurable holographic surfaces (RHS) can be integrated with ISAC to form the holographic ISAC paradigm, where enlarged radiation apertures of RHS can achieve significant beamforming gains, thereby improving both communication and sensing performance. In this paper, we investigate holographic beamforming designs for ISAC systems, which, unlike existing holographic beamforming schemes developed for RHS-aided communications, requires explicit consideration of mutual coupling effects within RHS. This is because, different from prior works only considering communication performance, ISAC systems incorporate sensing functionality, which is sensitive to sidelobe levels. Ignoring mutual coupling in holographic beamforming can lead to notable undesired sidelobes, thus degrading sensing performance. The consideration of mutual coupling introduces new challenges, i.e., it induces non-linearity in beamforming problems, rendering them inherently non-convex. To address this issue, we propose a tractable electromagnetic-compliant holographic ISAC model that characterizes mutual coupling in a closed form using coupled dipole approximations. We then develop an efficient mutual coupling aware holographic beamforming algorithm to suppress sidelobes and enhance ISAC performance. Numerical results validate effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

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arXiv2025

Revisiting Near-Far Field Boundary in Dual-Polarized XL-MIMO Systems

Extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) is expected to be an important technology in future sixth generation (6G) networks. Compared with conventional single-polarized XL-MIMO, where signals are transmitted and received in only one polarization direction, dual-polarized XL-MIMO systems achieve higher data rate by improving multiplexing performances, and thus are the focus of this paper. Due to enlarged aperture, near-field regions become non-negligible in XL-MIMO communications, necessitating accurate near-far field boundary characterizations. However, existing boundaries developed for single-polarized systems only consider phase or power differences across array elements while irrespective of cross-polarization discrimination (XPD) variances in dual-polarized XL-MIMO systems, deteriorating transmit covariance optimization performances. In this paper, we revisit near-far field boundaries for dual-polarized XL-MIMO systems by taking XPD differences into account, which faces the following challenge. Unlike existing near-far field boundaries, which only need to consider co-polarized channel components, deriving boundaries for dual-polarized XL-MIMO systems requires modeling joint effects of co-polarized and cross-polarized components. To address this issue, we model XPD variations across antennas and introduce a non-uniform XPD distance to complement existing near-far field boundaries. Based on the new distance criterion, we propose an efficient scheme to optimize transmit covariance. Numerical results validate our analysis and demonstrate the proposed algorithm's effectiveness.

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arXiv2025

Simultaneous Beamforming and Anti-Jamming With Intelligent Omni-Surfaces

Wireless transmission is vulnerable to malicious jamming attacks due to the openness of wireless channels, posing a severe threat to wireless communications. Current anti-jamming studies primarily focus on either enhancing desired signals or mitigating jamming, resulting in limited performance. To address this issue, intelligent omni-surface (IOS) is a promising solution. By jointly designing its reflective and refractive properties, the IOS can simultaneously nullify jamming and enhance desired signals. In this paper, we consider an IOS-aided multi-user anti-jamming communication system, aiming to improve desired signals and nullify jamming by optimizing IOS phase shifts and transmit beamforming. However, this is challenging due to the coupled and discrete IOS reflection and refraction phase shifts, the unknown jammer's beamformer, and imperfect jammer-related channel state information. To tackle this, we relax IOS phase shifts to continuous states and optimize with a coupling-aware algorithm using the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality and S-procedure, followed by a local search to recover discrete states. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly improves the sum rate amid jamming attacks.

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arXiv2025

Intelligent Reflecting Surface Based Localization of Mixed Near-Field and Far-Field Targets

This paper considers an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted bi-static localization architecture for the sixth-generation (6G) integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) network. The system consists of a transmit user, a receive base station (BS), an IRS, and multiple targets in either the far-field or near-field region of the IRS. In particular, we focus on the challenging scenario where the line-of-sight (LOS) paths between targets and the BS are blocked, such that the emitted orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signals from the user reach the BS merely via the user-target-IRS-BS path. Based on the signals received by the BS, our goal is to localize the targets by estimating their relative positions to the IRS, instead of to the BS. We show that subspace-based methods, such as the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm, can be applied onto the BS's received signals to estimate the relative states from the targets to the IRS. To this end, we create a virtual signal via combining user-target-IRS-BS channels over various time slots. By applying MUSIC on such a virtual signal, we are able to detect the far-field targets and the near-field targets, and estimate the angle-of-arrivals (AOAs) and/or ranges from the targets to the IRS. Furthermore, we theoretically verify that the proposed method can perfectly estimate the relative states from the targets to the IRS in the ideal case with infinite coherence blocks. Numerical results verify the effectiveness of our proposed IRS-assisted localization scheme. Our paper demonstrates the potential of employing passive anchors, i.e., IRSs, to improve the sensing coverage of the active anchors, i.e., BSs.

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arXiv2024

Directivity-Aware Degrees of Freedom Analysis for Extremely Large-Scale MIMO

Extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) communications, enabled by numerous antenna elements integrated into large antenna surfaces, can provide increased effective degree of freedom (EDoF) to achieve high diversity gain. However, it remains an open problem that how the EDoF is influenced by the directional radiation pattern of antenna elements. In this work, empowered by the wavenumber-domain channel representation, we analyze the EDoF in a general case where the directivity of antennas, determined by the antenna structure and element spacing, is considered. Specifically, we first reveal the uneven distribution of directivity-aware wavenumber-domain coupling coefficients, i.e., channel gain towards different directions, in the isotropic Rayleigh fading channel. EDoF is then calculated based on such distribution of coupling coefficients. A numerical method is also provided to obtain coupling coefficients via electromagnetic full-wave simulations. Due to the influence of antenna directivity, how EDoF and ergodic channel capacity vary with the element spacing are explored via simulations for different antenna types.

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arXiv2024

Reconfigurable Holographic Surface: A New Paradigm for Ultra-Massive MIMO

Evolving from massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) in current 5G communications, ultra-massive MIMO emerges as a seminal technology for fulfilling more stringent requirements of future 6G communications. However, widely-utilized phased arrays relying on active components make the implementation of ultra-massive MIMO in practice increasingly prohibitive from both cost and power consumption perspectives. In contrast, the development of reconfigurable holographic surface (RHS) provides a new paradigm to solve the above issue without the need of costly hardware components. By leveraging the holographic principle, the RHS serves as an ultra-thin and lightweight surface antenna integrated with the transceiver, which is a promising alternative to phased arrays for realizing ultra-massive MIMO. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive overview of the RHS, especially the RHS-aided communication and sensing. We first describe the basic concepts of RHS, and introduce its working principle and unique practical constraints. Moreover, we show how to utilize the RHS to achieve cost-efficient and high-performance wireless communication and sensing, and introduce the key technologies. In particular, we present the implementation of RHS with a wireless communication prototype, and report the experimental measurement results based on it. Finally, we outline some open challenges and potential future directions in this area.

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arXiv2024

Disco Intelligent Omni-Surfaces: 360-degree Fully-Passive Jamming Attacks

Intelligent omni-surfaces (IOSs) with 360-degree electromagnetic radiation significantly improves the performance of wireless systems, while an adversarial IOS also poses a significant potential risk for physical layer security. In this paper, we propose a "DISCO" IOS (DIOS) based fully-passive jammer (FPJ) that can launch omnidirectional fully-passive jamming attacks. In the proposed DIOS-based FPJ, the interrelated refractive and reflective (R&R) coefficients of the adversarial IOS are randomly generated, acting like a "DISCO" that distributes wireless energy radiated by the base station. By introducing active channel aging (ACA) during channel coherence time, the DIOS-based FPJ can perform omnidirectional fully-passive jamming without neither jamming power nor channel knowledge of legitimate users (LUs). To characterize the impact of the DIOS-based PFJ, we derive the statistical characteristics of DIOS-jammed channels based on two widely-used IOS models, i.e., the constant-amplitude model and the variable-amplitude model. Consequently, the asymptotic analysis of the ergodic achievable sum rates under the DIOS-based omnidirectional fully-passive jamming is given based on the derived stochastic characteristics for both the two IOS models. Based on the derived analysis, the omnidirectional jamming impact of the proposed DIOS-based FPJ implemented by a constant-amplitude IOS does not depend on either the quantization number or the stochastic distribution of the DIOS coefficients, while the conclusion does not hold on when a variable-amplitude IOS is used. Numerical results based on one-bit quantization of the IOS phase shifts are provided to verify the effectiveness of the derived theoretical analysis. The proposed DIOS-based FPJ can not only launch omnidirectional fully-passive jamming, but also improve the jamming impact by about 55% at 10 dBm transmit power per LU.

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arXiv2024

Holographic-Pattern Based Multi-User Beam Training in RHS-Aided Hybrid Near-Field and Far-Field Communications

Reconfigurable holographic surfaces (RHSs) have been suggested as an energy-efficient solution for extremely large-scale arrays. By controlling the amplitude of RHS elements, high-gain directional holographic patterns can be achieved. However, the complexity of acquiring real-time channel state information (CSI) for beamforming is exceedingly high, particularly in large-scale RHS-assisted communications, where users may distribute in the near-field region of RHS. This paper proposes a one-shot multi-user beam training scheme in large-scale RHS-assisted systems applicable to both near and far fields. The proposed beam training scheme comprises two phases: angle search and distance search, both conducted simultaneously for all users. For the angle search, an RHS angular codebook is designed based on holographic principles so that each codeword covers multiple angles in both near-field and far-field regions, enabling simultaneous angular search for all users. For the distance search, we construct the distance-adaptive codewords covering all candidate angles of users in a real-time way by leveraging the additivity of holographic patterns, which is different from the traditional phase array case. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves higher system throughput compared to traditional beam training schemes. The beam training accuracy approaches the upper bound of exhaustive search at a significantly reduced overhead.

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