Downlink Multiuser Communications Relying on Flexible Intelligent Metasurfaces

A flexible intelligent metasurface (FIM) is composed of an array of low-cost radiating elements, each of which can independently radiate electromagnetic signals and flexibly adjust its position through a 3D surface-morphing process. In our system, an FIM is deployed at a base station (BS) that transmits to multiple single-antenna users. We formulate an optimization problem for minimizing the total downlink transmit power at the BS by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming and the FIM’s surface shape, subject to an individual signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraint for each user as well as to a constraint on the maximum morphing range of the FIM. To address this problem, an efficient alternating optimization method is proposed to iteratively update the FIM’s surface shape and the transmit beamformer to gradually reduce the transmit power. Finally, our simulation results show that at a given data rate the FIM reduces the transmit power by about 3 dB compared to conventional rigid 2D arrays.