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Optical true time delay pool-based beamforming and limited feedback for reconfigurable intelligent surface-empowered cloud radio access networks

  • Research Paper
  • Special Focus on Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Future Wireless Communications
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Abstract

Introducing reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) greatly improves the wireless propagation environment. Limited to feedback overheads and computing power, the low-complexity precoding and the cost-effective beamforming implementation are urgently demanded in RIS-empowered millimeter-wave cloud radio access networks (mmWave C-RANs). Herein, an optical true time delay pool-based hybrid beam-forming (OTTDP-based HBF) scheme, enabling centralized analog beamforming control, is proposed for RIS-empowered mmWave C-RANs. By using codebook quantization techniques, we develop a non-iterative limited feedback (NI-LF) precoding algorithm for the RIS-empowered mmWave C-RAN using the proposed OTTDP-based HBF. In the NI-LF precoding algorithm, the complex joint optimization problem of hybrid precoding and phase-shifting of RIS is equivalently formulated as a maximum ratio transmission (MRT) problem and a sparse reconstruction problem. For an active antenna unit (AAU) equipped with eight antennas, a designed example of the proposed OTTDP is presented. Furthermore, for a RIS-empowered mmWave C-RAN at 28 GHz, the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) curves obtained via different precoding schemes are compared and discussed. Compared with the precoding without RIS, the proposed NI-LF precoding by using different codebooks to quantize the phase-shifting of the RIS respectively achieves 20.56, 19.55, and 18.93 dB performance improvement for the user located near the 49-element RIS. Moreover, performance degradations due to limited feedback are analyzed. The computational complexity and overhead of the proposed NI-LF precoding algorithm are also given and discussed.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2018YFB1801302), Project for Zhongshan Social Public Welfare Science and Technology (Grant No. 2019B2007), and Project for Innovation Team of Guangdong University (Grant No. 2018KCXTD033).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Information and Communication Engineering, Zhongshan Institute, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, 611731, China

    Huan Huang, Xiaowen Wang, Chongfu Zhang, Jie Peng, Muchuan Yang & Kun Qiu

  2. School of Electronic Information, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Zhongshan Institute, Zhongshan, 528402, China

    Chongfu Zhang

  3. School of Information Engineering, Guangdong University of Technology, Guangzhou, 510006, China

    Songnian Fu

  4. School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074, China

    Deming Liu

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  1. Huan Huang
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  2. Xiaowen Wang
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  3. Chongfu Zhang
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Correspondence to Chongfu Zhang.

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Huang, H., Wang, X., Zhang, C. et al. Optical true time delay pool-based beamforming and limited feedback for reconfigurable intelligent surface-empowered cloud radio access networks. Sci. China Inf. Sci. 64, 200303 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-020-3253-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-020-3253-7

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