Holographic Multi-User Multi-Stream Beamforming Maintaining Rate-Fairness

Abstract: We present the first investigation into the transmission of multi-stream information from a base station equipped with reconfigurable holographic surfaces (RHS) to multiple users with the aid of multi-antenna arrays. Building upon this, we propose the joint design of RHS and baseband beamformers that enables multi-stream delivery at fair rates across all users. Specifically, we first introduce a max-min rate optimization approach, which aims for maximizing the minimum rate for all users through iterative solutions of quadratic problems. To reduce complexity, we then propose a surrogate-based optimization approach that offers a low-complexity design alternative relying on closed-form updates. Our simulations show that the surrogate-based approach achieves nearly the same minimum rate as max-min optimization, while delivering sum-rates comparable to those of sum-rate maximization, overcoming the rate-fairness deficiency typical of the latter.