Beyond Massive MIMO: The Potential of Data Transmission With Large Intelligent Surfaces

By Sha Hu, Fredrik Rusek, Ove Edfors. IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, 2017

802 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we consider the potential of data transmission in a system with a massive number of radiating and sensing elements, thought of as a contiguous surface of electromagnetically active material. We refer to this as a large intelligent surface (LIS), which is a newly proposed concept and conceptually goes beyond contemporary massive MIMO technology. First, we consider capacities of single-antenna autonomous terminals communicating to the LIS where the entire surface is used as a receiving antenna array in a perfect line-of-sight propagation environment. Under the condition that the surface area is sufficiently large, the received signal after a matched-filtering operation can be closely approximated by a sinc-function-like intersymbol interference channel. Second, we analyze a normalized capacity measured per unit surface, for a fixed transmit power per volume unit with different terminal deployments. As terminal density increases, the limit of the normalized capacity [nats/s/Hz/volume-unit] achieved when wavelength <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\lambda$</tex-math></inline-formula> approaches zero is equal to half of the transmit power per volume unit divided by the noise spatial power spectral density. Third, we show that the number of independent signal dimensions that can be harvested per meter deployed surface is <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$2/\lambda$</tex-math></inline-formula> for one-dimensional terminal deployment, and <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\pi /\lambda ^2$</tex-math></inline-formula> per square meter for two- and three-dimensional terminal deployments. Finally, we consider implementations of the LIS in the form of a grid of conventional antenna elements, and show that the sampling lattice that minimizes the surface area and simultaneously obtains one independent signal dimension for every spent antenna is the hexagonal lattice.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4cedc3b10212986b854c7dd64d4d45fd692d5f3d

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Citations in the corpus

Prospective Multiple Antenna Technologies for Beyond 5G (2019, background): “In contrast, Large Intelligent Surfaces and Holographic Massive MIMO are two names used for large active surfaces exploiting active MIMO antennas driven by active energy-hungry components [147].”
Survey on 6G Frontiers: Trends, Applications, Requirements, Technologies and Future Research (2021, background): “For instance, electromagnetically active Large Intelligent Surfaces (LIS) made using meta-materials placed in walls, roads, buildings and other smart environments with integrated electronics will provide massive surfaces for wireless communication [65].”
An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for Terahertz Communications (2020, background): “end, a straightforward approach is to install large active arrays of AEs, also known as active large intelligent surfaces (LISs) [284]–[286] on indoor and outdoor walls and other structures.”
Toward Massive MIMO 2.0: Understanding Spatial Correlation, Interference Suppression, and Pilot Contamination (2019, background): “Different embodiments of this concept has recently appeared under the names large intelligent surfaces [55], extremely large aperture arrays [56], and holographic Massive MIMO [57].”
A Survey of Rate-Optimal Power Domain NOMA With Enabling Technologies of Future Wireless Networks (2019, background): “can be viewed as an extension to mMIMO as it involves a surface full of active transmitting antennas [103], the IRS is a different technology that does not use antennas at the”
Modeling and Performance Analysis for Movable Antenna Enabled Wireless Communications (2022, background): “Recently, the concept of holographic MIMO was proposed [11]–[13], which is also termed as continuous-aperture MIMO [14], holographic surface [15], or large intelligent surface [16] in the literature.”
A Tutorial on Near-Field XL-MIMO Communications Toward 6G (2023, neutral): “Such a result makes an intuitive sense since for the isotropic source, only half of the transmitted power will be captured by the inﬁnitely large continuous surface, while the other half of the power will never reach the surface [10], [43].”
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How It Works, State of Research, and The Road Ahead (2020, background): “In [256], notably, the authors coin the term LIS and describe it as “a new”
Secure Wireless Communication via Intelligent Reflecting Surface (2019, background): “It is worth noting that as compared to IRS, there is another technology called large intelligent surface (LIS) [8], which can operate in either active or passive mode, while it resembles IRS in the passive mode.”
Towards Smart and Reconfigurable Environment: Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Wireless Network (2019, background): “Next, we highlight the main differences as well as competitive advantages of IRS as compared to other existing technologies related to IRS, namely, active relay, backscatter communication, and active surface based massive MIMO [11].”
Asymptotic Max-Min SINR Analysis of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Assisted MISO Systems (2019, background): “The authors in [8] study the RIS-assisted MIMO system by utilizing stochastic geometry tools to derive closedform expressions for outage probability and users’ ergodic rates.”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface: A Programmable Wireless Environment for Physical Layer Security (2019, background): “Compared with the existing related techniques, i.e., traditional reﬂecting surfaces [7], amplify-and-forward (AF) relay [8], active intelligent surface [9], and backscatter communication [10]–[12], IRS has the following advantages [13], [14].”
Multi-Hop RIS-Empowered Terahertz Communications: A DRL-Based Hybrid Beamforming Design (2021, methodology): “For example, the potential transmission and positioning for RIS assisted multiple input multiple output (MIMO) systems were investigated in [24], where the RIS is used as a transmitter.”
Massive MIMO is a Reality - What is Next? Five Promising Research Directions for Antenna Arrays (2019, methodology): “The ultimate goal of ELAAs is to deploy so many antennas per BS that all the users have mutually orthogonal channels, leading to a per-user throughput similar to that of an additive white Gaussian noise channel without any propagation loss [44], [53].”
Holographic MIMO Communications: Theoretical Foundations, Enabling Technologies, and Future Directions (2022, methodology): “We see that some recent studies provided discussions on array gain [201] and power gain [203] for LIS based communication systems.”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Wireless Communications: Principles, Challenges, and Opportunities (2020, background): “In envisioned RIS deployments [1], where an RIS covers large sections of buildings’ facades outdoors and walls indoors, it is safe to assume that the transceivers of interest would be in the near-field of the RIS [30], especially in dense networks.”
Toward Smart Wireless Communications via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces: A Contemporary Survey (2019, methodology): “Instead of using the IRS as a signal reﬂector for performance enhancement of wireless communications, the authors in [103] examine the performance of using the IRS as the signal receiver.”
Non-Stationarities in Extra-Large-Scale Massive MIMO (2019, background): “The term Large Intelligent Surface (LIS) has appeared recently and denotes generically a large electromagnetic surface [4] that is active and hence”
An Interpretable Neural Network for Configuring Programmable Wireless Environments (2019, background): “Such materials have also been recently generalized under the term intelligent surfaces [4]–[7], to denote their end-facility while abstracting the underlying physical-layer technology speciﬁcs.”