Wideband channel sensing with holographic interference surfaces

Abstract: The Holographic Interference Surface (HIS) opens up a new prospect for building a more cost-effective wireless communication architecture by performing Radio Frequency (RF) domain signal processing. In this paper, we establish a wideband channel sensing architecture for electromagnetic wave reception and channel estimation based on the principle of holographic interference theory. Dute to the nonlinear structure of holograms, interferential fringes composed of wideband RF signals exhibit severe self-interference effects in the time-frequency domain, which are inherently resistant to the classical signal processing tools. To overcome the self-interference, we propose a holographic channel recovery method, which analyzes the time-domain variation of holograms from a geometrical perspective and constructs an inverse mapping from wideband holograms to object waves. Based on the Wirtinger partial derivative and Armijo condition, we then develop a wideband hologram-based maximum likelihood (WH-ML) estimation method for estimating the channel state information (CSI) from holograms. We also propose a geometric rotation-based object wave sensing (GROWS) algorithm to address the complicated computation of ML estimation. Furthermore, we derive the Cram\'er-Rao lower bound (CRLB) for investigating the achievable performance of wideband holographic channel estimation. Simulation results show that under the wideband channel sensing architecture, our proposed algorithm can accurately estimate the CSI in wideband scenarios.