Environment-Aware Joint Active/Passive Beamforming for RIS-Aided Communications Leveraging Channel Knowledge Map

Abstract

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided communication is a promising technology for 6G systems to reconfigure the propagation environment proactively. However, it requires efficient real-time channel training, which suffers excessive overhead. To resolve this challenge, taking advantage of sensing with radio waves and localization, we propose a novel environment-aware joint active/passive beamforming for RIS-aided wireless communication based on the new concept of channel knowledge map (CKM). In the proposed scheme, the user equipments (UEs) location information is combined with the radio environment information provided by CKM to achieve efficient beamforming without real-time training. Simulation results show the proposed scheme’s superior performance over training-based beamforming, which is also quite robust to errors related to UE’s location in practice.