Fundamental Trade-off in Wideband Stacked Intelligent Metasurface Assisted OFDMA Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Li, Zheao, An, Jiancheng, Yuen, Chau
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Li, Zheao
An, Jiancheng
Yuen, Chau
author_facet Li, Zheao
An, Jiancheng
Yuen, Chau
contents Conventional digital beamforming for wideband multiuser orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) demands numerous power-hungry components, increasing hardware costs and complexity. By contrast, the stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) can perform wave-based precoding at near-light speed, drastically reducing baseband overhead. However, realizing SIM-enhanced fully-analog beamforming for wideband multiuser transmissions remains challenging, as the SIM configuration has to handle interference across all subcarriers. To address this, this paper proposes a flexible subcarrier allocation strategy to fully reap the SIM-assisted fully-analog beamforming capability in an orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) system, where each subcarrier selectively serves one or more users to balance interference mitigation and resource utilization of SIM. We propose an iterative algorithm to jointly optimize the subcarrier assignment matrix and SIM transmission coefficients, approximating an interference-free channel for those selected subcarriers. Results show that the proposed system has low fitting errors yet allows each user to exploit more subcarriers. Further comparisons highlight a fundamental trade-off: our system achieves near-zero interference and robust data reliability without incurring the hardware burdens of digital precoding.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_08294
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fundamental Trade-off in Wideband Stacked Intelligent Metasurface Assisted OFDMA Systems
Li, Zheao
An, Jiancheng
Yuen, Chau
Signal Processing
Conventional digital beamforming for wideband multiuser orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) demands numerous power-hungry components, increasing hardware costs and complexity. By contrast, the stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) can perform wave-based precoding at near-light speed, drastically reducing baseband overhead. However, realizing SIM-enhanced fully-analog beamforming for wideband multiuser transmissions remains challenging, as the SIM configuration has to handle interference across all subcarriers. To address this, this paper proposes a flexible subcarrier allocation strategy to fully reap the SIM-assisted fully-analog beamforming capability in an orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) system, where each subcarrier selectively serves one or more users to balance interference mitigation and resource utilization of SIM. We propose an iterative algorithm to jointly optimize the subcarrier assignment matrix and SIM transmission coefficients, approximating an interference-free channel for those selected subcarriers. Results show that the proposed system has low fitting errors yet allows each user to exploit more subcarriers. Further comparisons highlight a fundamental trade-off: our system achieves near-zero interference and robust data reliability without incurring the hardware burdens of digital precoding.
title Fundamental Trade-off in Wideband Stacked Intelligent Metasurface Assisted OFDMA Systems
topic Signal Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08294