Programmable Wireless Channel for Multi-User MIMO Transmission Using Meta-Surface.

Recent advances in meta-materials offer the prospect of deploying smart surfaces, or intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS), that can manipulate electromagnetic (EM) channels and expand their achievable capacity. In this paper, we investigate the programmable channel of multi-user multiple input and multiple output (MU-MIMO) transmission and beamforming using meta-surface with multiple elements. We first model the MU-MIMO channel, and the optimal solution is derived based on the proposed multi-user Linearly Constrained Minimum Variance (MU-LCMV) beamformer. The beam pattern is analyzed, which shows that a single set of optimal weights can form multiple interference-free beams with redundant beams to be formed to achieve the multi-stream MIMO transmission in typical configurations. The mathematical relationships of the beams are derived with different surface configurations. Extensive simulations verify the results. This work is fundamental and can potentially enhance any state-of-the-art wireless communication systems ranging from transceiver design, system and architecture design, network deployment, and self-organizing-network operations.