Coupling-Aware RHS Beamforming for Wideband Multi-User Sum Rate Maximization

Abstract

Wideband multi-user transmission assisted by reconfigurable holographic surfaces (RHSs) is fundamentally limited by mutual coupling effect among densely packed sub-wavelength radiation elements. This paper develops a coupling-aware wideband RHS model and an efficient joint beamforming framework to maximize the multi-user sum rate under practical feeder power and RHS excitation power constraints. We establish an electromagnetic equivalent model based on magnetic-dipole elements and a physically interpretable coupling decomposition into free space near field coupling and guided surface wave coupling. For optimization, we employ a weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE)-based block coordinate method with a closed-form digital precoder update and introduce a Jacobian-aided coupling consistent hologram update that preserves coupling sensitivity via a first-order surrogate while keeping the hologram subproblem convex and efficiently solvable by projected first-order methods. Meep experiments verify the correctness of the proposed coupling model, and the simulations for a 28~GHz, 1~GHz-bandwidth RHS downlink prove the effectiveness of Jacobian-aided WMMSE-based method.