RIS-aided mmWave beam-forming for two-way communications of multiple pairs

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications is a key enabler towards realizing enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) as a key promise of 5G and beyond, due to the abundance of bandwidth available at mmWave bands. An mmWave coverage map consists of blind spots due to shadowing and fading especially in dense urban environments. Beam-forming employing massive MIMO is primarily used to address high attenuation in the mmWave channel. Due to their ability in manipulating the impinging electromagnetic waves in an energy-efficient fashion, Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) are considered a great match to complement the massive MIMO systems in realizing the beam-forming task and therefore effectively filling in the mmWave coverage gap. In this paper, we propose a novel RIS architecture, namely RIS-UPA where the RIS elements are arranged in a Uniform Planar Array (UPA). We show how RIS-UPA can be used in an RIS-aided MIMO system to fill the coverage gap in mmWave by forming beams of a custom footprint, with optimized main lobe gain, minimum leakage, and fairly sharp edges. Further, we propose a configuration for RIS-UPA that can support multiple two-way communication pairs, simultaneously. We theoretically obtain closed-form low-complexity solutions for our design and validate our theoretical findings by extensive numerical experiments.