arXiv subjects

Jiancheng An

Publications and source records attributed to Jiancheng An.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

Energy-Efficient SIM-assisted Communications: How Many Layers Do We Need?

The stacked intelligent metasurface (SIM), comprising multiple layers of reconfigurable transmissive metasurfaces, is becoming an increasingly viable solution for future wireless communication systems. In this paper, we explore the integration of SIM in a multi-antenna base station for application to downlink multi-user communications, and a realistic power consumption model for SIM-assisted systems is presented. Specifically, we focus on maximizing the energy efficiency (EE) for hybrid precoding design, i.e., the base station digital precoding and SIM wave-based beamforming. Due to the non-convexity and high complexity of the formulated problem, we employ the quadratic transformation method to reformulate the optimization problem and propose an alternating optimization (AO)-based joint precoding framework. Specifically, a successive convex approximation (SCA) algorithm is adopted for the base station precoding design. For the SIM wave-based beamforming, two algorithms are employed: the high-performance semidefinite programming (SDP) method and the low-complexity projected gradient ascent (PGA) algorithm. In particular, the results indicate that while the optimal number of SIM layers for maximizing the EE and spectral efficiency differs, a design of 2 to 5 layers can achieve satisfactory performance for both. Finally, numerical results are illustrated to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid precoding framework and to showcase the performance enhancement achieved by the algorithm in comparison to benchmark schemes.

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arXiv2025

Multi-User MISO with Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces: A DRL-Based Sum-Rate Optimization Approach

Stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs) represent a novel signal processing paradigm that enables over-the-air processing of electromagnetic waves at the speed of light. Their multi-layer architecture exhibits customizable computational capabilities compared to conventional single-layer reconfigurable intelligent surfaces and metasurface lenses. In this paper, we deploy SIM to improve the performance of multi-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) wireless systems through a low complexity manner with reduced numbers of transmit radio frequency chains. In particular, an optimization formulation for the joint design of the SIM phase shifts and the transmit power allocation is presented, which is efficiently tackled via a customized deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approach that systematically explores pre-designed states of the SIM-parametrized smart wireless environment. The presented performance evaluation results demonstrate the proposed method's capability to effectively learn from the wireless environment, while consistently outperforming conventional precoding schemes under low transmit power conditions. Furthermore, the implementation of hyperparameter tuning and whitening process significantly enhance the robustness of the proposed DRL framework.

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arXiv2025

Flexible Intelligent Metasurface-Aided Wireless Communications: Architecture and Performance

Typical reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) implementations include metasurfaces with almost passive unit elements capable of reflecting their incident waves in controllable ways, enhancing wireless communications in a cost-effective manner. In this paper, we advance the concept of intelligent metasurfaces by introducing a flexible array geometry, termed flexible intelligent metasurface (FIM), which supports both element movement (EM) and passive beamforming (PBF). In particular, based on the single-input single-output (SISO) system setup, we first compare three modes of FIM, namely, EM-only, PBF-only, and EM-PBF, in terms of received signal power under different FIM and channel setups. The PBF-only mode, which only adjusts the reflect phase, is shown to be less effective than the EM-only mode in enhancing received signal strength. In a multi-element, multi-path scenario, the EM-only mode improves the received signal power by 125% compared to the PBF-only mode. The EM-PBF mode, which optimizes both element positions and phases, further enhances performance. Additionally, we investigate the channel estimation problem for FIM systems by designing a protocol that gathers EM and PBF measurements, enabling the formulation of a compressive sensing problem for joint cascaded and direct channel estimation. We then propose a sparse recovery algorithm called clustering mean-field variational sparse Bayesian learning, which enhances estimation performance while maintaining low complexity.

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arXiv2025

Flexible Intelligent Metasurfaces for Enhancing MIMO Communications

Flexible intelligent metasurfaces (FIMs) show great potential for improving the wireless network capacity in an energy-efficient manner. An FIM is a soft array consisting of several low-cost radiating elements. Each element can independently emit electromagnetic signals, while flexibly adjusting its position even perpendicularly to the overall surface to `morph' its 3D shape. More explicitly, compared to a conventional rigid antenna array, an FIM is capable of finding an optimal 3D surface shape that provides improved signal quality. In this paper, we study point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communications between a pair of FIMs. In order to characterize the capacity limits of FIM-aided MIMO transmissions over frequency-flat fading channels, we formulate a transmit optimization problem for maximizing the MIMO channel capacity by jointly optimizing the 3D surface shapes of the transmitting and receiving FIMs as well as the MIMO transmit covariance matrix, subject to the total transmit power constraint and to the maximum perpendicular morphing range of the FIM. To solve this problem, we develop an efficient block coordinate descent (BCD) algorithm. The BCD algorithm iteratively updates the 3D surface shapes of the FIMs and the transmit covariance matrix, while keeping the other fixed, to find a locally optimal solution. Numerical results verify that FIMs can achieve higher MIMO capacity than that of the conventional rigid arrays. In particular, the MIMO channel capacity can be doubled by the proposed BCD algorithm under some setups.

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arXiv2025

Onboard Terrain Classification via Stacked Intelligent Metasurface-Diffractive Deep Neural Networks from SAR Level-0 Raw Data

This paper introduces a novel approach for real-time onboard terrain classification from Sentinel-1 (S1) level-0 raw In-phase/Quadrature (IQ) data, leveraging a Stacked Intelligent Metasurface (SIM) to perform inference directly in the analog wave domain. Unlike conventional digital deep neural networks, the proposed multi-layer Diffractive Deep Neural Network (D$^2$NN) setup implements automatic feature extraction as electromagnetic waves propagate through stacked metasurface layers. This design not only reduces reliance on expensive downlink bandwidth and high-power computing at terrestrial stations but also achieves performance levels around 90\% directly from the real raw IQ data, in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 Score. Our method therefore helps bridge the gap between next-generation remote sensing tasks and in-orbit processing needs, paving the way for computationally efficient remote sensing applications.

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arXiv2025

Weighted Codebook Scheme for RIS-Assisted Point-to-Point MIMO Communications

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) can reshape the characteristics of wireless channels by intelligently regulating the phase shifts of reflecting elements. Recently, various codebook schemes have been utilized to optimize the reflection coefficients (RCs); however, the selection of the optimal codeword is usually obtained by evaluating a metric of interest. In this letter, we propose a novel weighted design on the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) codebook to obtain the optimal RCs for RIS-assisted point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. Specifically, we first introduce a channel training protocol where we configure the RIS RCs using the DFT codebook to obtain a set of observations through the uplink training process. Secondly, based on these observed samples, the Lagrange multiplier method is utilized to optimize the weights in an iterative manner, which could result in a higher channel capacity for assisting in the downlink data transmission. Thirdly, we investigate the effect of different codeword configuration orders on system performance and design an efficient codeword configuration method based on statistical channel state information (CSI). Finally, numerical simulations are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed scheme.

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arXiv2025

Downlink Multiuser Communications Relying on Flexible Intelligent Metasurfaces

A flexible intelligent metasurface (FIM) is composed of an array of low-cost radiating elements, each of which can independently radiate electromagnetic signals and flexibly adjust its position through a 3D surface-morphing process. In our system, an FIM is deployed at a base station (BS) that transmits to multiple single-antenna users. We formulate an optimization problem for minimizing the total downlink transmit power at the BS by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming and the FIM's surface shape, subject to an individual signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraint for each user as well as to a constraint on the maximum morphing range of the FIM. To address this problem, an efficient alternating optimization method is proposed to iteratively update the FIM's surface shape and the transmit beamformer to gradually reduce the transmit power. Finally, our simulation results show that at a given data rate the FIM reduces the transmit power by about $3$ dB compared to conventional rigid 2D arrays.

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arXiv2025

Stacked Intelligent Metasurface-Based Transceiver Design for Near-Field Wideband Systems

Intelligent metasurfaces may be harnessed for realizing efficient holographic multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems, at a low hardware-cost and high energy-efficiency. As part of this family, we propose a hybrid beamforming design for stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) aided wideband wireless systems relying on the near-field channel model. Specifically, the holographic beamformer is designed based on configuring the phase shifts in each layer of the SIM for maximizing the sum of the baseband eigen-channel gains of all users. To optimize the SIM phase shifts, we propose a layer-by-layer iterative algorithm for optimizing the phase shifts in each layer alternately. Then, the minimum mean square error (MMSE) transmit precoding method is employed for the digital beamformer to support multi-user access. Furthermore, the mitigation of the SIM phase tuning error is also taken into account in the digital beamformer by exploiting its statistics. The power sharing ratio of each user is designed based on the iterative waterfilling power allocation algorithm. Additionally, our analytical results indicate that the spectral efficiency attained saturates in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region due to the phase tuning error resulting from the imperfect SIM hardware quality. The simulation results show that the SIM-aided holographic MIMO outperforms the state-of-the-art (SoA) single-layer holographic MIMO in terms of its achievable rate. We further demonstrate that the near-field channel model allows the SIM-based transceiver design to support multiple users, since the spatial resources represented both by the angle domain and the distance domain can be exploited.

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arXiv2025

Stacked Intelligent Metasurface Enabled Near-Field Multiuser Beamfocusing in the Wave Domain

Intelligent surfaces represent a breakthrough technology capable of customizing the wireless channel cost-effectively. However, the existing works generally focus on planar wavefront, neglecting near-field spherical wavefront characteristics caused by large array aperture and high operation frequencies in the terahertz (THz). Additionally, the single-layer reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) lacks the signal processing ability to mitigate the computational complexity at the base station (BS). To address this issue, we introduce a novel stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) comprised of an array of programmable metasurface layers. The SIM aims to substitute conventional digital baseband architecture to execute computing tasks with ultra-low processing delay, albeit with a reduced number of radio-frequency (RF) chains and low-resolution digital-to-analog converters. In this paper, we present a SIM-aided multiuser multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) near-field system, where the SIM is integrated into the BS to perform beamfocusing in the wave domain and customize an end-to-end channel with minimized inter-user interference. Finally, the numerical results demonstrate that near-field communication achieves superior spatial gain over the far-field, and the SIM effectively suppresses inter-user interference as the wireless signals propagate through it.

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arXiv2024

Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces for Task-Oriented Semantic Communications

Semantic communication (SemCom) leveraging advanced deep learning (DL) technologies enhances the efficiency and reliability of information transmission. Emerging stacked intelligent metasurface (SIM) with an electromagnetic neural network (EMNN) architecture enables complex computations at the speed of light. In this letter, we introduce an innovative SIM-aided SemCom system for image recognition tasks, where a SIM is positioned in front of the transmitting antenna. In contrast to conventional communication systems that transmit modulated signals carrying the image information or compressed semantic information, the carrier EM wave is directly transmitted from the source. The input layer of the SIM performs source encoding, while the remaining multi-layer architecture constitutes an EMNN for semantic encoding, transforming signals into a unique beam towards a receiving antenna corresponding to the image class. Remarkably, both the source and semantic encoding occur naturally as the EM waves propagate through the SIM. At the receiver, the image is recognized by probing the received signal magnitude across the receiving array. To this end, we utilize an efficient mini-batch gradient descent algorithm to train the transmission coefficients of SIM's meta-atoms to learn the semantic representation of the image. Extensive numerical results verify the effectiveness of utilizing the SIM-based EMNN for image recognition task-oriented SemComs, achieving more than 90\% recognition accuracy.

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arXiv2024

Harnessing Stacked Intelligent Metasurface for Enhanced Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems: A Low-Power and Cost Approach

In this paper, we explore the integration of low-power, low-cost stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) into cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) systems to enhance access point (AP) capabilities and address high power consumption and cost challenges. Specifically, we investigate the uplink performance of a SIM-enhanced CF mMIMO system and propose a novel system framework. First, the closed-form expressions of the spectral efficiency (SE) are obtained using the unique two-layer signal processing framework of CF mMIMO systems. Second, to mitigate inter-user interference, an interference-based greedy algorithm for pilot allocation is introduced. Third, a wave-based beamforming algorithm for SIM is proposed, based only on statistical channel state information, which effectively reduces the fronthaul costs. Finally, a max-min SE power control algorithm is proposed to improve the performance of UE with inferior channel conditions. The results indicate that increasing the number of SIM layers and meta-atoms leads to significant performance improvements and allows for a reduction in the number of APs and AP antennas, thus lowering the costs. In particular, the best SE performance is achieved with the deployment of 20 APs plus 1200 SIM meta-atoms. Finally, the proposed wave-based beamforming algorithm can enhance the SE performance of SIM-enhanced CF-mMIMO systems by 57\%, significantly outperforming traditional CF mMIMO systems.

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arXiv2024

Joint AP-UE Association and Precoding for SIM-Aided Cell-Free Massive MIMO Systems

Cell-free (CF) massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) systems are emerging as promising alternatives to cellular networks, especially in ultra-dense environments. However, further capacity enhancement requires the deployment of more access points (APs), which will lead to high costs and high energy consumption. To address this issue, in this paper, we explore the integration of low-power, low-cost stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) into CF mMIMO systems to enhance AP capabilities. The key point is that SIM performs precoding-related matrix operations in the wave domain. As a consequence, each AP antenna only needs to transmit data streams for a single user equipment (UE), eliminating the need for complex baseband digital precoding. Then, we formulate the problem of joint AP-UE association and precoding at APs and SIMs to maximize the system sum rate. Due to the non-convexity and high complexity of the formulated problem, we propose a two-stage signal processing framework to solve it. In particular, in the first stage, we propose an AP antenna greedy association (AGA) algorithm to minimize UE interference. In the second stage, we introduce an alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm that separates the joint power and wave-based precoding optimization problem into two distinct sub-problems: the complex quadratic transform method is used for AP antenna power control, and the projection gradient ascent (PGA) algorithm is employed to find suboptimal solutions for the SIM wave-based precoding. Finally, the numerical results validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and assess the performance enhancement achieved by the algorithm in comparison to various benchmark schemes. The results show that, with the same number of SIM meta-atoms, the proposed algorithm improves the sum rate by approximately 275% compared to the benchmark scheme.

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arXiv2024

Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces for Integrated Sensing and Communications

Stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) have recently emerged as a promising technology, which can realize transmit precoding in the wave domain. In this paper, we investigate a SIM-aided integrated sensing and communications system, in which SIM is capable of generating a desired beam pattern for simultaneously communicating with multiple downlink users and detecting a radar target. Specifically, we formulate an optimization problem of maximizing the spectrum efficiency, while satisfying the power constraint of the desired direction. This requires jointly designing the phase shifts of the SIM and the power allocation at the base station. By incorporating the sensing power constraint into the objective functions as a penalty term, we further simplify the optimization problem and solve it by customizing an efficient gradient ascent algorithm. Finally, extensive numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed wave-domain precoder for automatically mitigating the inter-user interference and generating a desired beampattern for the sensing task, as multiple separate data streams transmit through the SIM.

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arXiv2024

Flexible Antenna Arrays for Wireless Communications: Modeling and Performance Evaluation

Flexible antenna arrays (FAAs), distinguished by their rotatable, bendable, and foldable properties, are extensively employed in flexible radio systems to achieve customized radiation patterns. This paper aims to illustrate that FAAs, capable of dynamically adjusting surface shapes, can enhance communication performances with both omni-directional and directional antenna patterns, in terms of multi-path channel power and channel angle Cramér-Rao bounds. To this end, we develop a mathematical model that elucidates the impacts of the variations in antenna positions and orientations as the array transitions from a flat to a rotated, bent, and folded state, all contingent on the flexible degree-of-freedom. Moreover, since the array shape adjustment operates across the entire beamspace, especially with directional patterns, we discuss the sum-rate in the multi-sector base station that covers the $360^\circ$ communication area. Particularly, to thoroughly explore the multi-sector sum-rate, we propose separate flexible precoding (SFP), joint flexible precoding (JFP), and semi-joint flexible precoding (SJFP), respectively. In our numerical analysis comparing the optimized FAA to the fixed uniform planar array, we find that the bendable FAA achieves a remarkable $156\%$ sum-rate improvement compared to the fixed planar array in the case of JFP with the directional pattern. Furthermore, the rotatable FAA exhibits notably superior performance in SFP and SJFP cases with omni-directional patterns, with respective $35\%$ and $281\%$.

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arXiv2024

Environment-Aware Codebook Design for RIS-Assisted MU-MISO Communications: Implementation and Performance Analysis

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) provides a new electromagnetic response control solution, which can proactively reshape the characteristics of wireless channel environments. In RIS-assisted communication systems, the acquisition of channel state information (CSI) and the optimization of reflecting coefficients constitute major design challenges. To address these issues, codebook-based solutions have been developed recently, which, however, are mostly environment-agnostic. In this paper, a novel environment-aware codebook protocol is proposed, which can significantly reduce both pilot overhead and computational complexity, while maintaining expected communication performance. Specifically, first of all, a channel training framework is introduced to divide the training phase into several blocks. In each block, we directly estimate the composite end-to-end channel and focus only on the transmit beamforming. Second, we propose an environment-aware codebook generation scheme, which first generates a group of channels based on statistical CSI, and then obtains their corresponding RIS configuration by utilizing the alternating optimization (AO) method offline. In each online training block, the RIS is configured based on the corresponding codeword in the environment-aware codebook, and the optimal codeword resulting in the highest sum rate is adopted for assisting in the downlink data transmission. Third, we analyze the theoretical performance of the environment-aware codebook-based protocol taking into account the channel estimation errors. Finally, numerical simulations are provided to verify our theoretical analysis and the performance of the proposed scheme. In particular, the simulation results demonstrate that our protocol is more competitive than conventional environment-agnostic codebooks.

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arXiv2024

Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces for Holographic MIMO Aided Cell-Free Networks

Large-scale multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems are capable of achieving high date rate. However, given the high hardware cost and excessive power consumption of massive MIMO systems, as a remedy, intelligent metasurfaces have been designed for efficient holographic MIMO (HMIMO) systems. In this paper, we propose a HMIMO architecture based on stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) for the uplink of cell-free systems, where the SIM is employed at the access points (APs) for improving the spectral- and energy-efficiency. Specifically, we conceive distributed beamforming for SIM-assisted cell-free networks, where both the SIM coefficients and the local receiver combiner vectors of each AP are optimized based on the local channel state information (CSI) for the local detection of each user equipment (UE) information. Afterward, the central processing unit (CPU) fuses the local detections gleaned from all APs to detect the aggregate multi-user signal. Specifically, to design the SIM coefficients and the combining vectors of the APs, a low-complexity layer-by-layer iterative optimization algorithm is proposed for maximizing the equivalent gain of the channel spanning from the UEs to the APs. At the CPU, the weight vector used for combining the local detections from all APs is designed based on the minimum mean square error (MMSE) criterion, where the hardware impairments (HWIs) are also taken into consideration based on their statistics. The simulation results show that the SIM-based HMIMO outperforms the conventional single-layer HMIMO in terms of the achievable rate. We demonstrate that both the HWI of the radio frequency (RF) chains at the APs and the UEs limit the achievable rate in the high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) region.

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arXiv2024

Achievable Rate Optimization for Stacked Intelligent Metasurface-Assisted Holographic MIMO Communications

Stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) is a revolutionary technology, which can outperform its single-layer counterparts by performing advanced signal processing relying on wave propagation. In this work, we exploit SIM to enable transmit precoding and receiver combining in holographic multiple-input multiple-output (HMIMO) communications, and we study the achievable rate by formulating a joint optimization problem of the SIM phase shifts at both sides of the transceiver and the covariance matrix of the transmitted signal. Notably, we propose its solution by means of an iterative optimization algorithm that relies on the projected gradient method, and accounts for all optimization parameters simultaneously. We also obtain the step size guaranteeing the convergence of the proposed algorithm. Simulation results provide fundamental insights such the performance improvements compared to the single-RIS counterpart and conventional MIMO system. Remarkably, the proposed algorithm results in the same achievable rate as the alternating optimization (AO) benchmark but with a less number of iterations.

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arXiv2024

Environment-Aware Codebook for RIS-Assisted MU-MISO Communications: Implementation and Performance Analysis

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) provides a new electromagnetic response control solution, which can reshape the characteristics of wireless channels. In this paper, we propose a novel environment-aware codebook protocol for RIS-assisted multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) systems. Specifically, we first introduce a channel training protocol which consists of off-line and on-line stages. Secondly, we propose an environment-aware codebook generation scheme, which utilizes the statistical channel state information and alternating optimization method to generate codewords offline. Then, in the on-line stage, we use these pre-designed codewords to configure the RIS, and the optimal codeword resulting in the highest sum rate is adopted for assisting in the downlink data transmission. Thirdly, we analyze the theoretical performance of the proposed protocol considering the channel estimation errors. Finally, numerical simulations are provided to verify our theoretical analysis and the performance of the proposed scheme.

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