Spectral Efficiency Maximization for DMA-enabled Multiuser MISO with Statistical CSI

Abstract: Dynamic metasurface antennas (DMAs) offer the potential to achieve large-scale antenna arrays with low power consumption and reduced hardware costs, making them a promising technology for future communication systems. This paper investigates the spectral efficiency (SE) of DMA-enabled multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems in both uplink and downlink transmissions, using only statistical channel state information (CSI) to maximize the ergodic sum rate of multiple users. For the uplink system, we consider two decoding rules: minimum mean square error (MMSE) with and without successive interference cancellation (SIC). For both decoders, we derive closed-form surrogates to substitute the original expressions of ergodic sum rate and formulate tractable optimization problems for designing DMA weights. Then, a weighted MMSE (WMMSE)-based algorithm is proposed to maximize the ergodic sum rate. For the downlink system, we derive an approximate expression for the ergodic sum rate and formulate a hybrid analog/digital beamforming optimization problem that jointly optimizes the digital precoder and DMA weights. A penalty dual decomposition (PDD)-based algorithm is proposed by leveraging the fractional programming framework. Numerical results validate the accuracy of the derived surrogates and highlight the superiority of the proposed algorithms over baseline schemes. It is shown that these algorithms are effective across various DMA settings and are particularly well-suited for system design in fast time-varying channels.