Location Information Assisted Beamforming Design for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Aided Communication Systems

Abstract: In reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication systems, in order to overcome the limitation of the conventional channel state information (CSI) acquisition techniques, this paper proposes a location information assisted beamforming design without the requirement of the conventional channel training process. First, we establish the geometrical relation between the channel model and the user location, based on which we derive an approximate CSI error bound based on the user location error by means of Taylor approximation, triangle and power mean inequalities, and semidefinite relaxation (SDR). Second, for combating the uncertainty of the location error, we formulate a worst-case robust beamforming optimization problem. To solve the problem efficiently, we develop a novel iterative algorithm by utilizing various optimization tools such as Lagrange multiplier, matrix inversion lemma, SDR, as well as branch-and-bound (BnB). Additionally, we provide sufficient conditions for the SDR to output rank-one solutions, and modify the BnB algorithm to acquire the phase shift solution under an arbitrary constraint of possible phase shift values. Finally, we analyse the algorithm convergence and complexity, and carry out simulations to validate the theoretical derivation of the CSI error bound and the robustness of the proposed algorithm. Compared with the existing non-robust approach and the robust beamforming techniques based on S-procedure and penalty convex-concave procedure (CCP), our method can converge more quickly and achieve better performance in terms of the worst-case signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver.