A New Old Idea: Beam-Steering Reflectarrays for Efficient Sub-THz Multiuser MIMO

We present a novel, power- & hardware-efficient, multiuser, multibeam RIS (Reflective Intelligent Surface) architecture for multiuser MIMO, especially for very high frequency bands (e.g., high mmWave and sub-THz), where channels are typically sparse in the beamspace and LOS is the dominant component. The key module is formed by an active multiantenna feeder (AMAF) with a small number of active antennas, placed in the near field of a RIS with a much larger number of passive controllable reflecting elements. We propose a pragmatic approach to obtain a steerable beam with high gain and very low sidelobes. Then K independently controlled beams can be achieved by closely stacking K such AMAF-RIS modules. Our analysis includes the mutual interference between the modules and the fact that, due to the delay difference of propagation through the AMAF-RIS structure, the resulting channel matrix is frequency selective even for pure LOS propagation. We consider a 3D geometry and show that "beam focusing" is in fact possible (and much more effective in terms of coverage) also in the far-field, by creating spotbeams with limited footprint both in angle and in range. Our results show that: 1) simple RF beamforming (BF) without computationally expensive baseband multiuser precoding is sufficient to practically eliminate multiuser interference when the users are chosen with sufficient angular/range separation, thanks to the extremely low sidelobe beams; 2) the impact of beam pointing errors with standard deviation as large as 2.5 deg and RIS quantized phase-shifters with quantization bits > 2 is essentially negligible; 3) The proposed architecture is more power efficient & much simpler from a hardware implementation viewpoint than standard active arrays with the same BF performance. We show also that the array gain of the proposed AMAF-RIS structure is linear with the RIS aperture.