Scalable Beamforming Design for Multi-RIS-Aided MU-MIMO Systems with Imperfect CSIT

Abstract: A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has emerged as a promising solution for enhancing the capabilities of wireless communications. This paper presents a scalable beamforming design for maximizing the spectral efficiency (SE) of multi-RIS-aided communications through joint optimization of the precoder and RIS phase shifts in multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MU-MIMO) systems under imperfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT). To address key challenges of the joint optimization problem, we first decompose it into two subproblems with deriving a proper lower bound. We then leverage a generalized power iteration (GPI) approach to identify a superior local optimal precoding solution. We further extend this approach to the RIS design using regularization; we set a RIS regularization function to efficiently handle the unitmodulus constraints, and also find the superior local optimal solution for RIS phase shifts under the GPI-based optimization framework. Subsequently, we propose an alternating optimization method. In particular, utilizing the block-diagonal structure of the matrices the GPI method, the proposed algorithm offers multi-RIS scalable beamforming as well as superior SE performance. Simulations validate the proposed method in terms of both the sum SE performance and the scalability.