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Cited by 718Advanced Wireless Communication TechnologiesAdvanced Antenna and Metasurface TechnologiesMillimeter-Wave Propagation and Modeling

Active Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided Wireless Communications

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Long, Ruizhe, Liang, Ying-Chang, Pei, Yiyang, Larsson, Erik G.·2021·IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
DOI 10.1109/twc.2021.3064024
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Abstract

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) is a promising solution to reconfigure the wireless environment in a controllable way. To compensate for the double-fading attenuation in the RIS-aided link, a large number of passive reflecting elements (REs) are conventionally deployed at the RIS, resulting in large surface size and considerable circuit power consumption. In this paper, we propose a new type of RIS, called active RIS, where each RE is assisted by active loads (negative resistance), that reflect and amplify the incident signal instead of only reflecting it with the adjustable phase shift as in the case of a passive RIS. Therefore, for a given power budget at the RIS, a strengthened RIS-aided link can be achieved by increasing the number of active REs as well as amplifying the incident signal. We consider the use of an active RIS to a single input multiple output (SIMO) system. However, it would unintentionally amplify the RIS-correlated noise, and thus the proposed system has to balance the conflict between the received signal power maximization and the RIS-correlated noise minimization at the receiver. To achieve this goal, it has to optimize the reflecting coefficient matrix at the RIS and the receive beamforming at the receiver. An alternating optimization algorithm is proposed to solve the problem. Specifically, the receive beamforming is obtained with a closed-form solution based on linear minimum-mean-square-error (MMSE) criterion, while the reflecting coefficient matrix is obtained by solving a series of sequential convex approximation (SCA) problems. Simulation results show that the proposed active RIS-aided system could achieve better performance over the conventional passive RIS-aided system with the same power budget.

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  • Long et al. proposed an active RIS that can reflect signals with adjustable phase shifts and amplify incoming signals, and developed a method for optimizing reflection coefficients to minimize RIS-related noise while maximizing received signal power.

    “To address this issue, Long et al. [60] proposed a new type of active RIS that can not only reflect signals with adjustable phase shifts but also amplify incoming signals. They also developed a method for optimizing the reflection coefficients to minimize RIS-related noise, while maximizing the received signal power.”

    From Emerging Technologies in Intelligent Metasurfaces: Shaping the Future of Wireless Communications (2026) · cites this paper as [60]

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Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Long, R., Liang, Y.-C., Pei, Y., & Larsson, E. G.
Affiliations
  • University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (CN)
  • Singapore Institute of Technology (SG)
  • Linköping University (SE)
ORCID
Venue
IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications
Publisher
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Published
2021-08
Volume
20
Issue
8
Pages
4962-4975
ISSN
  • 1536-1276 (ISSN-L)
  • 1558-2248
DOI
10.1109/twc.2021.3064024
OpenAlex
W3137570378
Cited by
718
References
1
Citations by year
2026: 93 · 2025: 195 · 2024: 178 · 2023: 162 · 2022: 74 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 1
FWCI
31.54
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • DiVA (Linkoping University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (61631005, U1801261)
  • National Key Research and Development Program of China (2018YFB1801105)
  • Key Areas of Research and Development Program of Guangdong Province, China (2018B010114001)
  • Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (ZYGX2019Z022)
  • Programme of Introducing Talents of Discipline to Universities (B20064)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Electrical and Electronic Engineering › Advanced Wireless Communication Technologies
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Aerospace Engineering › Advanced Antenna and Metasurface Technologies
  • Physical Sciences › Engineering › Electrical and Electronic Engineering › Millimeter-Wave Propagation and Modeling
Keywords
active reconfigurable intelligent surface, reconfigurable intelligent surface, signal amplification, negative resistance, double fading, SIMO systems, receive beamforming, alternating optimization, successive convex approximation, MMSE beamforming

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