Antenna Selection for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: A Transceiver-Agnostic Passive Beamforming Configuration

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is capable of improving the wireless system performance by steering the reflected signal in the desired direction. One of the major challenges is that both the transceiver and RIS have to be jointly optimized, where the optimization problems have to be reformulated for different system models and scenarios. To circumvent this challenge, new low-complexity antenna selection (AS) algorithms for transceiver-agnostic RIS configuration are proposed. Given a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel, the proposed RIS-AS opts for accurately aligning the RIS both with the transmit antenna (TA) and receive antenna (RA) for the sake of maximizing the MIMO channel’s overall output power. The proposed RIS-AS only has to configure the RIS alone, i.e. without iterations with the transceiver optimization. As a result, the proposed RIS-AS has the compelling benefit that they are generically applicable, regardless of the specific transceiver architecture. Our simulation results confirm that the proposed RIS-AS is capable of supporting any MIMO configuration, regardless of their closed/open-loop, single-/ full-RF and multiplexing-/diversity-oriented setups.