This work examines the performance gain achieved by deploying an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in covert communications. To this end, we formulate the joint design of the transmit power and the IRS reflection coefficients by taking into account the communication covertness for the cases with global channel state information (CSI) and without a warden’s instantaneous CSI. For the case of global CSI, we first prove that perfect covertness is achievable with the aid of the IRS even for a single-antenna transmitter, which is impossible without an IRS. Then, we develop a penalty successive convex approximation (PSCA) algorithm to tackle the design problem. Considering the high complexity of the PSCA algorithm, we further propose a low-complexity two-stage algorithm, where analytical expressions for the transmit power and the IRS’s reflection coefficients are derived. For the case without the warden’s instantaneous CSI, we first derive the covertness constraint analytically facilitating the optimal phase shift design. Then, we consider three hardware-related constraints on the IRS’s reflection amplitudes and determine their optimal designs together with the optimal transmit power. Our examination shows that significant performance gain can be achieved by deploying an IRS into covert communications.

Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS)-Aided Covert Wireless Communications with Delay Constraint

This letter investigates the impact of spatial channel correlation on the outage probability of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted single-input single-output (SISO) communication systems. In particular, we derive a novel closed-form expression of the outage probability for arbitrary phase shifts and correlation matrices of the indirect channels. To shed light on the impact of the spatial correlation, we further attain the closed-form expressions for two common scenarios met in the literature when the large-scale fading coefficients are expressed by the loss over a propagation distance. Numerical results validate the tightness and effectiveness of the closed-form expressions. Furthermore, the spatial correlation offers significant decreases in the outage probability as the direct channel is blocked.

Outage Probability Analysis of IRS-Assisted Systems Under Spatially Correlated Channels

The future of wireless communications looks exciting with the potential new use cases and challenging requirements of future 6th generation (6G) wireless networks. Since the traditional wireless communications, the propagation medium has been perceived as a randomly behaving entity between the transmitter and the receiver, which degrades the quality of the received signal due to the uncontrollable interactions of the transmitted radio waves with the surrounding objects. The recent advent of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) in wireless communications enables, on the other hand, network operators to control the radio waves (the scattering, reflection, and refraction characteristics) to eliminate the negative effects of natural wireless propagation. Recent results have revealed that non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) benefits from RIS mechanism which can effectively provide effective transmissions. Motivated by the potential of these emerging technologies, we study the impact of hardware impairment in RIS-aided NOMA system in term of performance metrics. We then derive analytical expressions of outage probability and throughput as main performance metrics. Simulations are conducted to validate the analytical expressions. We find that the number of meta-surfaces in RIS, transmit power at the base station, power allocation factors play important role to demonstrate improvement in system performance of RIS relying on NOMA compared with orthogonal multiple access (OMA). Numerical results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed RIS-aided NOMA transmission strategies.

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Outage Performance Analysis of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces-Aided NOMA Under Presence of Hardware Impairment

This letter investigates the performance of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) systems with direct links, and the phase shifts of the RIS are designed based on the statistical channel state information (CSI). We first derive the closed-form expression of the uplink ergodic data rate. Then, based on the derived expression, we use the genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the sum data rate maximization problem. With low-complexity maximal-ratio combination (MRC) and low-overhead statistical CSI-based scheme, we validate that the RIS can bring significant performance gains to the traditional mMIMO systems.

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Statistical CSI-Based Design for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided Massive MIMO Systems With Direct Links

The energy efficiency (EE) of femtocells is always limited by the surrounding radio environments in heterogeneous networks (HetNets), such as walls and obstacles. In this paper, we propose to deploy reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) to improve the EE of femtocells. However, perfect channel state information is more difficult to obtain due to the passive characteristics of RISs and non-cooperative relationship between different tiers. Besides, the low-cost transceivers and reflecting units suffer nontrivial hardware impairments (HWIs) due to the hardware limitations of practical systems. To this end, we investigate a realistic robust beamforming design based on max-min fairness for an RIS-aided HetNet under channel uncertainties and residual HWIs. The joint optimization of transmit beamforming vectors of femto base stations (FBSs) and the phase-shift matrices of RISs is formulated as a non-convex problem to maximize the minimum EE of the femtocell subject to the constraints of the maximum transmit power of FBSs, the quality of service of users, and unit modulus phase-shift constraints of RISs. We develop an iterative block coordinate descent-based algorithm which exploits the semi-definite relaxation, the S-procedure, and the singular value decomposition method. Simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm outperforms existing algorithms in terms of fairness, EE, and outage probability.

Robust Max-Min Energy Efficiency for RIS-Aided HetNets With Distortion Noises

This paper considers an uplink reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with statistical channel state information (CSI). The RIS is deployed to help conventional massive MIMO networks serve the users in the dead zone. We consider the Rician channel model and exploit the long-time statistical CSI to design the phase shifts of the RIS, while the maximum ratio combination (MRC) technique is applied for the active beamforming at the base station (BS) relying on the instantaneous CSI. Firstly, we reveal the power scaling laws and derive the closed-form expressions for the uplink achievable rate which holds for arbitrary numbers of base station (BS) antennas. Based on the theoretical expressions, we discuss the rate performance under some special cases and provide the average asymptotic rate when using random phase shifts. Then, we consider the sum-rate maximization and the minimum user rate maximization problems by optimizing the phase shifts at the RIS. However, these two optimization problems are challenging to solve due to the complicated data rate expression. To solve these problems, we propose a novel genetic algorithm (GA) with low complexity but can achieve considerable performance. Finally, extensive simulations are provided to validate the benefits by integrating RIS into conventional massive MIMO systems. Besides, our simulations demonstrate the feasibility of deploying large-size but low-resolution RIS in massive MIMO systems.

Power Scaling Law Analysis and Phase Shift Optimization of RIS-aided Massive MIMO Systems with Statistical CSI

This paper investigates the performance of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with direct links, and the phase shifts of the RIS are designed based on the statistical channel state information (CSI). We first derive the closed-form expression of the uplink ergodic data rate. Then, based on the derived expression, we use the genetic algorithm (GA) to solve the sum data rate maximization problem. With low-complexity maximal-ratio combination (MRC) and low-overhead statistical CSI-based scheme, we validate that the RIS can still bring significant performance gains to traditional massive MIMO systems.

Statistical CSI-based Design for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-aided Massive MIMO Systems with Direct Links

In this letter, we derive the uplink achievable rate expression of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems, taking into account the phase noise at IRS and the quantization error at base stations (BSs). We show that the performance is limited only by the resolution of analog-digital converters (ADCs) at BSs when the number of IRS reflectors grows without bound. On the other hand, if BSs have ideal ADCs, the performance loss caused by IRS phase noise is constant. Finally, our results validate the feasibility of using low-precision hardware at the IRS when BSs are equipped with low-resolution ADCs.

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Uplink Achievable Rate of Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Millimeter-Wave Communications With Low-Resolution ADC and Phase Noise

In this paper, we derive the uplink achievable rate expression of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems, taking into account the phase noise at IRS and the quantization error at base stations (BSs). We show that the performance is limited only by the resolution of analog-digital converters (ADCs) at BSs when the number of IRS reflectors grows without bound. On the other hand, if BSs have ideal ADCs, the performance loss caused by IRS phase noise is a constant. Finally, our results validate the feasibility of using low-precision hardware at the IRS when BSs are equipped with low-resolution ADCs.

Kangda Zhi

Papers

Power Scaling Law Analysis and Phase Shift Optimization of RIS-aided Massive MIMO Systems with Statistical CSI

Statistical CSI-Based Design for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided Massive MIMO Systems With Direct Links

Statistical CSI-based Design for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-aided Massive MIMO Systems with Direct Links

Uplink Achievable Rate of Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Millimeter-Wave Communications With Low-Resolution ADC and Phase Noise

Uplink Achievable Rate of Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Millimeter-Wave Communications with Low-Resolution ADC and Phase Noise