The idea of using a Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) consisting of a large array of passive scattering elements to assist wireless communication systems has recently attracted much attention from academia and industry. A central issue with RI
S is how much power they can effectively convey to the target radio nodes. Regarding this question, several power level models exist in the literature but few have been validated through experiments. In this paper, we propose a radar cross section-based received power model for an RIS-aided wireless communication system that is rooted in the physical properties of RIS. Our proposed model follows the intuition that the received power is related to the distances from the transmitter/receiver to the RIS, the angles in the TX-RIS-RX triangle, the effective area of each element, and the reflection coefficient of each element. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to model the angle-dependent phase shift of the reflection coefficient, which is typically ignored in existing literature. We further measure the received power with our experimental platform in different scenarios to validate our model. The measurement results show that our model is appropriate both in near field and far field and can characterize the impact of angles well.
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have recently received widespread attention in the field of wireless communication. An RIS can be controlled to reflect incident waves from the transmitter towards the receiver; a feature that is believed to
fundamentally contribute to beyond 5G wireless technology. The typical RIS consists of entirely passive elements, which requires the high-dimensional channel estimation to be done elsewhere. Therefore, in this paper, we present a semi-passive large-scale RIS architecture equipped with only a small fraction of simplified receiver units with only 1-bit quantization. Based on this architecture, we first propose an alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM)-based approach to recover the training signals at the passive RIS elements, We then obtain the global channel by combining a channel sparsification step with the generalized approximate message passing (GAMP) algorithm. Our proposed scheme exploits both the sparsity and low-rankness properties of the channel in the joint spatial-frequency domain of a wideband mmWave multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication system. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the pilot signaling needed for accurate channel estimation and outperform previous methods, even with fewer receiver units.
