Stacked Intelligent Metasurface-Based Transceiver Design for Near-Field Wideband Systems

Intelligent metasurfaces may be harnessed for realizing efficient holographic multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) systems, at a low hardware-cost and high energy-efficiency. As part of this family, we propose a hybrid beamforming design for stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM) aided wideband wireless systems relying on the near-field channel model. Specifically, the holographic beamformer is designed based on configuring the phase shifts in each layer of the SIM for maximizing the sum of the baseband eigen-channel gains of all users. To optimize the SIM phase shifts, we propose a layer-by-layer iterative algorithm for optimizing the phase shifts in each layer alternately. Then, the minimum mean square error (MMSE) transmit precoding method is employed for the digital beamformer to support multi-user access. Furthermore, the mitigation of the SIM phase tuning error is also taken into account in the digital beamformer by exploiting its statistics. The power sharing ratio of each user is designed based on the iterative waterfilling power allocation algorithm. Additionally, our analytical results indicate that the spectral efficiency attained saturates in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region due to the phase tuning error resulting from the imperfect SIM hardware quality. The simulation results show that the SIM-aided holographic MIMO outperforms the state-of-the-art (SoA) single-layer holographic MIMO in terms of its achievable rate. We further demonstrate that the near-field channel model allows the SIM-based transceiver design to support multiple users, since the spatial resources represented both by the angle domain and the distance domain can be exploited.