Location-Aided Distributed Beamforming for Near-Field Communications with Element-Wise RIS

Abstract

Active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) emerges as an effective technique to resist the double-fading attenuation of passive RIS. By embedding with power harvesting function, it further evolves to zero-power active RIS, which can effectively enhance the flexibility of RIS deployment without external power demand. Nevertheless, existing works neglected the inherent difficulty of channel estimation (CE) for RIS-assisted systems, and the discrete phase shift constraint in practical deployment. In this paper we design a new element-wise RIS architecture and propose a distributed location-aided transmission scheme with low complexity to enhance the reflected gain for channel state information (CSI)-limited RIS-assisted near-field communications. Specifically, the new element-wise RIS provides dynamic element selection capability with low hardware resources. Based on Fresnel diffraction theory, we construct the mapping from locations in space-domain to phase distributions of waves in phase-domain and reveal the priority of elements for harvesting and reflecting. {Then, the distributed beamforming design with the phase of determine-then-align is proposed, where the estimation overhead reduction stems from exempted requirements of RIS-associated CE at base station (BS).} The asymptotic analysis indicates that the proposed scheme can achieve the optimal gain with a fixed proportion of reflective elements when RIS is large, followed by simulations to verify its superiority to other protocols.