Although reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) can improve the performance of wireless networks by smartly reconfiguring the radio environment, existing passive RISs face two key challenges, i.e., double-fading attenuation and dependence on grid/battery. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a new RIS architecture, called multi-functional RIS (MF-RIS). Different from conventional reflecting-only RIS, the proposed MF-RIS is capable of supporting multiple functions with one surface, including signal reflection, amplification, and energy harvesting. As such, our MF-RIS is able to overcome the double-fading attenuation by harvesting energy from incident signals. Through theoretical analysis, we derive the achievable capacity of an MF-RIS-aided communication network. Compared to the capacity achieved by the existing self-sustainable RIS, we derive the number of reflective elements required for MF-RIS to outperform self-sustainable RIS. To realize a self-sustainable communication system, we investigate the use of MF-RIS in improving the sum-rate of multi-user wireless networks. Specifically, we solve a non-convex optimization problem by jointly designing the transmit beamforming and MF-RIS coefficients. As an extension, we investigate a resource allocation problem in a practical scenario with imperfect channel state information. By approximating the semi-infinite constraints with the Sprocedure and the general sign-definiteness, we propose a robust beamforming scheme to combat the inevitable channel estimation errors. Finally, numerical results show that: 1) compared to the self-sustainable RIS, MF-RIS can strike a better balance between energy self-sustainability and throughput improvement; and 2) unlike reflecting-only RIS which can be deployed near the transmitter or receiver, MF-RIS should be deployed closer to the transmitter for higher spectrum efficiency.
Interference alignment (IA) with symbol extensions in the quasi-static flat-fading K-user multipleinput multiple-output (MIMO) interference channel (IC) is considered in this paper. In general, long symbol extensions are required to achieve the optimal fractional degrees of freedom (DOF). However, long symbol extensions over orthogonal dimensions produce structured (diagonal or block diagonal) channel matrices from transmitters to receivers. Most of existing approaches are limited in cases where the channels have some special structures, because they align the interference without preserving the dimensionality of the desired signal explicitly. To overcome this common drawback of most existing IA algorithms, two novel iterative algorithms for IA with symbol extensions are proposed. The first algorithm designs transceivers for IA based on the mean square error (MSE) criterion which minimizes the total MSE of the system while preserving the dimensionality of the desired signal. The novel IA algorithm is a constrained optimization problem which can be solved by Lagrangian method. Its convergence is proven as well. Utilizing the reciprocity of alignment, the second algorithm is proposed based on the maximization of the multidimensional case of the generalized Rayleigh Quotient. It maximizes each receiver's signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) while preserving the dimensionality of the desired signal. In simulation results, we show the superiority of the proposed algorithms in terms of four aspects, i.e., average sum rate, the fraction of the interfering signal power in the desired signal subspace, bit error rate (BER) and the relative power of the weakest desired data stream.
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