Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces Enabled Multiuser Beamforming in the Wave Domain

Reconfigurable intelligent surface has recently emerged as a promising technology for reshaping the wireless environment by leveraging massive low-cost passive elements. Prior works mainly focus on a single-layer metasurface that lacks the capability of suppressing inter-user interference. By contrast, we propose in this paper a stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIM)-enabled transceiver design for multiuser multiple-input single-output downlink communications. Specifically, a SIM having a multilayer structure is deployed at the base station to perform the transmit beamforming directly in the electromagnetic wave domain. As a result, the conventional digital beamforming and high-resolution analog-to-digital converters as well as the excessive number of radio-frequency chains are fully removed, which sharply reduces the hardware cost and energy consumption, while substantially decreasing the precoding delay benefiting from the computation at the speed of light. To this end, we formulate an optimization problem for maximizing the sum rate of all users by jointly designing the transmit power allocated to different users and the wave-based beamforming. Finally, numerical results based on a customized alternating optimization algorithm corroborate the effectiveness of our SIM-enabled wave-based beamforming design as compared to various benchmark schemes. Most notably, the wave-based beamforming is capable of decreasing the precoding delay by eight orders of magnitude compared to its digital counterpart.