Cascaded reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) greatly improve network coverage and reliability. This paper examines the outage probability (OP) of multi-cascaded RISs (MCRISs)-aided systems over doubly-correlated Rayleigh multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channels. The moment-generating function is invoked to convert the OP into a numerical inversion of Laplace integral. To capture profound insights, we conduct an in-depth asymptotic investigation into the outage behavior of MCRIS-aided MIMO communications by leveraging random matrix theory in the high-SNR regime. The asymptotic results reveal that the firsthRISs with the smallest number of reflective elements primarily dictate the bottleneck of reliability performance, wherehis influenced by the variation in the number of reflective elements across the RISs. Specifically, smaller variations result in a largerh, while greater disparities reduce it. Additionally, we identify an “unsaturation effect” that occurs when the performance margin, or residual spatial degree of freedom (DoF), after propagation through the firsthRISs cannot be evenly distributed between the transmitter and the RISs. This effect slows down the decline of the OP with increasing SNR. More cascaded RISs impair the spatial DoF of wireless communications, resulting in the loss of half of the independent fading channels compared to the system without the support of RIS as the cascaded number of RISs increases. Majorization theory is subsequently applied to unveil the negative effect of doubly-spatial correlation on system reliability. Finally, Monte Carlo simulations are carried out for validations.

Many emerging artificial intelligence-driven applications rely on the availability of large-scale, stable, and fresh sensing data, underscoring the Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC). This paper proposes to amalgamate Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) and Hybrid Automatic Repeat reQuest with Incremental Redundancy (HARQ-IR) to accommodate reliable and real-time wireless services. The outage probability and the Average Age of Information (AAoI) are used to evaluate the transmission reliability and data freshness for HARQ-IR-NOMA schemes. To reveal physical insights as well as ease system designs, the asymptotic outage probability in the high Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) regime is derived by developing a recursive dominant term approximation method. Moreover, the AAoI is deduced in terms of the outage probability by considering an M/G/1/1 queuing model. The asymptotic AAoI at high SNR is shown to be an increasing function of the diversity order-deficiency, which theoretically justifies the tradeoff between the transmission reliability and the data freshness. Furthermore, the AAoI is minimized by optimizing the transmission powers between users as well as HARQ rounds while maintaining the outage and total power constraints. The minimal AAoI is obtained by developing Geometric Programming (GP)-based and Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL)-based methods. Finally, the numerical results are presented for verification.

Reconfigurable distributed antenna and reflecting surface (RDARS) is a new architecture for the sixth-generation (6G) millimeter wave (mmWave) communications. In RDARS-aided mmWave systems, the active and passive beamforming design and working mode configuration for reconfigurable elements are crucial for system performance. In this paper, we aim to maximize the weighted sum rate (WSR) in the RDARS-aided mmWave system. To take advantage of RDARS, we first design a reconfigurable codebook (RCB) in which the number and dimension of the codeword can be flexibly adjusted. Then, a low overhead beam training scheme based on hierarchical search is proposed. Accordingly, the active and passive beamforming for data transmission is designed to achieve the maximum WSR for both space-division multiple access (SDMA) and time-division multiple access (TDMA) schemes. For the TDMA scheme, the optimal number of RDARS transmit elements and the allocated power budget for WSR maximization are derived in closed form. Besides, the superiority of the RDARS is verified and the conditions under which RDARS outperforms RIS and DAS are given. For the SDMA scheme, we characterize the relationship between the number of RDARS connected elements and the user distribution, followed by the derivation of the optimal placement positions of the RDARS transmit elements. High-quality beamforming design solutions are derived to minimize the inter-user interference (IUI) at the base station and RDARS side respectively, which nearly leads to the maximal WSR. Finally, simulation results confirm our theoretical findings and the superiority of the proposed schemes.

Reconfigurable distributed antenna and reflecting surface (RDARS) has been recently proposed as a promising technology. This architecture enables each element to perform flexibly either in the reflection mode, like the traditional passive reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), or in the connection mode, akin to the distributed antenna system (DAS). This dual capability allows RDARS to harness both reflection gain and distribution gain. In this paper, we investigate a dynamic RDARS-aided multiple-input multiple-output communication system, where the optimal configuration of the elements operating in connection mode can provide additional selection gain. Considering the theoretical and practical significances, we address the achievable rate maximization problem by jointly optimizing the mode selection, transmit power allocation and passive beamforming under both perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI) cases. Due to the involvement of the mode selection design of RDARS, the problem is more challenging than those of the traditional RIS-aided systems with fixed reflection operation. For perfect CSI case, by investigating the inherent properties of the objective function, we propose a greedy-based alternating optimization (AO) algorithm with low-complexity and then extend the proposed algorithm to the general multi-user multi-RDARS scenario. Additionally, we find interesting insights about the mode selection of RDARS in a special scenario with a single-antenna user. The result shows that the RDARS elements leading to the largest distribution gain should be selected to operate in connection mode for the rate maximization. For imperfect CSI case, we develop an efficient alternative direction method of multipliers-based AO algorithm. Numerical results show that RDARS-assisted system outperforms the passive-RIS assisted system and DAS under both perfect and imperfect CSI scenarios with promising reflection, distribution and selection gains.

Distributed antenna system (DAS) has been extensively applied in millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications due to its geographically dispersed and cooperating antennas. Incorporating reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) into DAS is a promising and effective approach to reducing hardware costs and energy consumption while simultaneously maintaining the benefits of distributed gains. Recently, an innovative architecture named reconfigurable distributed antenna and reflecting surface (RDARS) has attracted significant attention as each element can be flexibly switched between the connection and the reflection modes. This dynamic mode switching offers substantial gains by providing an additional degree of freedom (DoF) in system design. In this paper, we investigate the weighted sum rate (WSR) optimization problem in the RDARS-aided downlink mmWave multi-user system and propose a penalty item-based weighted minimum mean square error (PWM) algorithm to jointly optimize the passive phase coefficients, the mode switching, and the active beamforming for the base station and the RDARS elements in the connection mode. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the RDARS structure in improving WSR and verify the effectiveness of the proposed PWM algorithm.

Reconfigurable distributed antennas and reflecting surface (RDARS) has been recently proposed as a promising technology. This architecture enables each element to operate either in the reflection mode, like the conventional passive reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), or in the connection mode, akin to the distributed antenna system (DAS). This dual capability allows RDARS to harness both reflection gain and distribution gain. In this paper, to further unleash the potential of the RDARSaided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system in terms of additional selection gain, we formulate an achievable rate maximization problem by jointly designing the mode selection matrix, the power allocation matrix and the reflection coefficient matrix. Due to the mode selection design of RDARS, this problem is more challenging than those of the conventional RIS-aided systems with fixed elements locations. To tackle it, by investigating the beneficial properties of the objective function, we propose a greedy-based alternating optimization (AO) algorithm with low-complexity. Numerical results clearly illustrate the reflection gain, distribution gain and selection gain of RDARS and show that RDARS-assisted system can achieve superior performance than the passive-RIS assisted system and DAS.

Accurate channel state information (CSI) is critical for signal detection and precoding design in massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems. However, traditional channel attention mechanisms for CSI feedback heavily rely on global pooling methods, which overlook finer-grained statistical patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel CSI feedback scheme for massive MIMO systems by utilizing a differentiable histogram attention mechanism, named DHANet, to boosts channel feature extraction and improve system performance. Specifically, DHANet replaces the traditional global pooling operations in the Squeeze-and-Excitation Block with kernel density estimation (KDE)-based differentiable histogram feature extraction, thereby enabling the capture of detailed channel-specific statistical information for more efficient CSI feedback. Moreover, the proposed mechanism can be seamlessly integrated into the existing CSI feedback architectures. Simulation results demonstrate that the DHANet achieves superior performance compared to the traditional pooling-based methods, particularly under 1/8 compression rates, highlighting its significant potential for CSI feedback in massive MIMO systems.

This article presents a novel integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework that leverages recent advancements in reconfigurable distributed antennas and reflecting surfaces (RDARS). RDARS is a programmable structure composed of numerous elements, each of which can be flexibly configured to operate in either reflection mode, resembling a passive reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), or connected mode, functioning as a remote transmit or receive antenna. Our RDARS-aided ISAC framework effectively mitigates the adverse effects of multiplicative fading compared to passive RIS-aided counterparts and reduces costs and energy consumption relative to active RIS-aided systems. Within this framework, we address a radar output signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) maximization problem by jointly optimizing the active transmit beamforming matrix, the reflection and mode selection matrices of RDARS, and the receive filter, while ensuring communication requirements are met. To tackle the inherent nonconvexity and mixed-integer optimization challenges, we propose an efficient penalty-based iterative algorithm with guaranteed convergence based on the majorization-minimization (MM) framework. Additionally, we present some interesting insights about the mode selection of RDARS by considering a RDARS-aided sensing system. Numerical results demonstrate the superior performance of our framework compared to existing structures, attributed to the distribution, reflection, and selection gains provided by the dynamically configured RDARS.

Distributed Antenna Systems (DASs) employ multiple antenna arrays in remote radio units to achieve highly directional transmission and provide great coverage performance for future-generation networks. However, the utilization of fully digital or hybrid active antenna arrays results in a significant increase in hardware costs and power consumption for DAS. To address these issues, integrating DAS with Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) offers a viable approach to ensure coverage and transmission performance while maintaining low hardware costs and power consumption. To incorporate the merits of RIS into the DAS from practical consideration, a novel architecture of “Reconfigurable Distributed Antennas and Reflecting Surfaces (RDARS)” is proposed in this paper. Specifically, based on the design of the additional direct-through state together with the existing high-quality fronthaul link, any element of the RDARS can be dynamically programmed to connect with the base station (BS) via fibers and perform theconnected modeas remote distributed antennas of the BS to receive or transmit signals. Additionally, RDARS also inherits the low-cost and low-energy-consumption benefits of fully passive RISs by default configuring the elements as passive to perform thereflection mode. As a result, RDARS encompasses both DAS and RIS as special cases, offering flexible control over the trade-off betweendistribution gainandreflection gainto enhance performance. To unveil the potential of such architecture, the ergodic achievable rate under the RDARS architecture is analyzed and closed-form expression with meaningful insights is derived. The theoretical analysis proves that the RDARS can achieve a higher achievable rate than both DAS and fully passive RIS with the passive beamforming gain provided by elements actingreflection modewhile combating the “multiplicative fading” suffered by RISs through theconnected modeperformed at the RDARS. Simulation results also demonstrate the superiority of the RDARS architecture over DAS and passive RIS-aided systems and its flexible trade-off between performance and cost. To further validate the feasibility and effectiveness, an RDARS prototype with 256 elements is built for real experiments. Experimental results show that the RDARS-aided system with only one element operating inconnected modecan achieve an additional 21% and 170% throughput improvement over DAS and RIS-aided systems, respectively.

In this paper, we investigate a novel reconfigurable distributed antennas and reflecting surface (RDARS) aided multi-user massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system with imperfect channel state information (CSI) and propose a practical two-timescale (TTS) transceiver design to reduce the communication overhead and computational complexity of the system. In the RDARS-aided system, not only distribution gain but also reflection gain can be obtained by a flexible combination of the distributed antennas and reflecting surface, which differentiates the system from the others and also makes the TTS design challenging. To enable the optimal TTS transceiver design, the achievable rate of the system is first derived in closed-form. The rate expression is general and covers that of the distributed antenna systems (DAS) and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided systems as special cases. Then the TTS design aiming at the weighted sum rate maximization is considered. To solve the challenging non-convex optimization problem with high order design variables, i.e., the transmit powers and the phase shifts at the RDARS, a block coordinate descent based method is proposed to find the optimal solutions in semi-closed forms iteratively. Specifically, two efficient algorithms are proposed with provable convergence for the optimal phase shift design, i.e., Riemannian Gradient Ascent based algorithm by exploiting the unit-modulus constraints, and Two-Tier Majorization-Minimization based algorithm with closed-form optimal solutions in each iteration. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and demonstrate the superiority of deploying RDARS in massive MIMO systems to provide substantial rate improvement with a significantly reduced total number of active antennas/RF chains and lower transmit power when compared to the DAS and RIS-aided systems.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has emerged as a cost-effective solution for green communications in 6G. However, its further extensive use has been greatly limited due to its fully passive characteristics. Considering the appealing distribution gains of distributed antenna systems (DAS), a flexible reconfigurable architecture called reconfigurable distributed antenna and reflecting surface (RDARS) is proposed. RDARS encompasses DAS and RIS as two special cases and maintains the advantages of distributed antennas while reducing the hardware cost by replacing some active antennas with low-cost passive reflecting surfaces. In this paper, we present a RDARS-aided uplink multi-user communication system and investigate the system transmission reliability with the newly proposed architecture. Specifically, in addition to the distribution gain and the reflection gain provided by the connection and reflection modes, respectively, we also consider the dynamic mode switching of each element which introduces an additional degree of freedom (DoF) and thus results in a selection gain. As such, we aim to minimize the total sum mean-square-error (MSE) of all data streams by jointly optimizing the receive beamforming matrix, the reflection phase shifts and the channel-aware placement of elements in the connection mode. To tackle this nonconvex problem with intractable binary and cardinality constraints, we propose an inexact block coordinate descent (BCD) based penalty dual decomposition (PDD) algorithm with the guaranteed convergence. Since the PDD algorithm usually suffers from high computational complexity, a low-complexity greedy-search-based alternating optimization (AO) algorithm is developed to yield a semi-closed-form solution with acceptable performance. Numerical results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed architecture compared to the conventional fully passive RIS or DAS. Furthermore, some insights about the practical implementation of RDARS are provided.

Accurate channel state information (CSI) is essential for downlink precoding in frequency division duplexing (FDD) massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). However, obtaining CSI through feedback from the user equipment (UE) becomes challenging with the increasing scale of antennas and subcarriers and leads to extremely high CSI feedback overhead. Deep learning-based methods have emerged for compressing CSI but these methods generally require substantial collected samples and thus pose practical challenges. Moreover, existing deep learning methods also suffer from dramatically growing feedback overhead owing to their focus on full-dimensional CSI feedback. To address these issues, we propose a low-overhead Incorporation-Extrapolation based Few-Shot CSI feedback Framework (IEFSF) for massive MIMO systems. An incorporation-extrapolation scheme for eigenvector-based CSI feedback is proposed to reduce the feedback overhead. Then, to alleviate the necessity of extensive collected samples and enable few-shot CSI feedback, we further propose a knowledge-driven data augmentation (KDDA) method and an artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC) -based data augmentation method by exploiting the domain knowledge of wireless channels and by exploiting a novel generative model, respectively. Experimental results based on the DeepMIMO dataset demonstrate that the proposed IEFSF significantly reduces CSI feedback overhead by 64 times compared with existing methods while maintaining higher feedback accuracy using only several hundred collected samples.

In view of the nonideality of communication links in the Internet of Things (IoT) originating from transceiver hardware impairments, in this article, we introduce a general framework for hardware impairments-aware multiantenna transceiver design, which considers different availabilities of CSI at the transmitter (CSIT) and the receiver (CSIR). The well-known Kronecker model is applied to characterize stochastic channel state information (CSI) errors. For each case, we aim to minimize the (average) total mean square error (MSE) of all data streams subject to the practical per-antenna power constraints. To address the nonconvexity of the formulated problem, we propose an efficient majorization–minimization (MM)-based iterative algorithm to transform the original problem into a series of convex subproblems with semiclosed-form optimal solutions. For low-complexity implementation, we also develop an alternative scheme for directly finding a high-quality suboptimal solution by considering both worst case hardware impairments and worst case CSI errors. In particular, since an explicit expression of the average total MSE for the perfect CSIR and imperfect CSIT case is hard to derive, we instead optimize its effective upper and lower bounds. The prospective applications of our work in the two currently popular multiple-input–multiple-output (MIMO) IoT scenarios are then discussed. Furthermore, we fundamentally reveal the MSE floor effect caused by both hardware distortion and CSI imperfection in the high-SNR regime. Numerical results illustrate the excellent average total MSE and average bit error rate (BER) performance of our proposed algorithms over the adopted benchmark schemes.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has been envisioned as an innovative technology to assist millimeter wave (mmWave) communications. Thanks to both advantages of low hardware cost and low power consumption, the hybrid transceiver structure also becomes an integral component of mmWave systems. However, due to practical limitations of hardware components, the RIS-assisted mmWave communications usually suffer unavoidable hardware impairments (HWIs). In this paper, we aim to minimize the (sum) MSE and maximize the average rate of the hardware-impaired RIS-assisted point-to-point mmWave MIMO system, respectively, by jointly optimizing the hybrid transceiver and RIS reflection coefficients under the realistic discrete phase shift constraints. We firstly consider the single-antenna user case and propose efficient alternating optimization (AO) algorithms to solve the two intractable problems. A binary-oriented exact penalty (BEP) method is developed for the involved discrete optimization, which is able to strike a good trade-off between performance and complexity. Moreover, we analyze the optimality of AO algorithms under the cascaded line-of-sight (LoS) channel condition, and reveal both the MSE floor effect and average rate saturation effect in the high-SNR regime. The above studies are then extended to the general multi-antenna user case, where a low-complexity two-phase scheme with the aim of creating the favorable RIS-cascaded channel in the first phase and enhancing system performance in the second phase is proposed. This two-phase scheme is also demonstrated to attain the optimal performance in the LoS scenario. Numerical results validate our theoretical analysis and illustrate superior performance of the proposed algorithms over various benchmark schemes.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has been anticipated to be a novel cost-effective technology to improve the performance of future wireless systems. In this paper, we investigate a practical RIS-aided multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system in the presence of transceiver hardware impairments, RIS phase noise and imperfect channel state information (CSI). Joint design of the MIMO transceiver and RIS reflection matrix to minimize the total average mean-square-error (MSE) of all data streams is particularly considered. This joint design problem is non-convex and challenging to solve due to the newly considered practical imperfections. To tackle the issue, we first analyze the total average MSE by incorporating the impacts of the above system imperfections. Then, in order to handle the tightly coupled optimization variables and non-convex NP-hard constraints, an efficient iterative algorithm based on alternating optimization (AO) framework is proposed with guaranteed convergence, where each subproblem admits a closed-form optimal solution by leveraging the majorization-minimization (MM) technique. Moreover, via exploiting the special structure of the unit-modulus constraints, we propose a modified Riemannian gradient ascent (RGA) algorithm for the discrete RIS phase shift optimization. Furthermore, the optimality of the proposed algorithm is validated under line-of-sight (LoS) channel conditions, and the irreducible MSE floor effect induced by imperfections of both hardware and CSI is also revealed in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime. Numerical results show the superior MSE performance of our proposed algorithm over the adopted benchmark schemes, and demonstrate that increasing the number of RIS elements is not always beneficial under the above system imperfections.