Saturation in two-timescale RIS beamforming

This paper investigates reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted wireless communications under a two-timescale architecture, in which the RIS phase shifts are optimized from long-term channel statistics, eliminating per-element training and thereby slashing channel estimation overhead. It i...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Sadeghian, Masoud, Lozano Solsona, Angel, Fodor, Gabor
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Institución:Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Repositorio:Repositorio Digital de la UPF
OAI Identifier:oai:dnet:rdupf_______::d2727ede82335155a4df43678c9e8e54
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/10230/73317
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/OJCOMS.2025.3638874
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Reconfigurable intelligent surface
Beamforming
Statistical channel-state information
Two-timescale design
Descripción
Sumario:This paper investigates reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted wireless communications under a two-timescale architecture, in which the RIS phase shifts are optimized from long-term channel statistics, eliminating per-element training and thereby slashing channel estimation overhead. It is shown that, while the power captured by the RIS scales linearly with the number of its elements, the two-timescale beamforming gain upon re-radiation towards the receiver saturates rapidly as the number of RIS elements increases, for a broad class of power angular spectra (PAS). The saturation ceiling depends on the PAS angular decay, which governs how quickly inter-element spatial correlation vanishes. Steeper decays yield stronger correlations and, hence, a higher ceiling. The implications of this saturation on the effectiveness of two-timescale RIS-assisted communications are discussed.