Flexible Intelligent Metasurface for Downlink Communications under Statistical CSI

Abstract: Flexible intelligent metasurface (FIM) is a recently developed, groundbreaking hardware technology with promising potential for 6G wireless systems. Unlike conventional rigid antenna array (RAA)-based transmitters, FIM-assisted transmitters can dynamically alter their physical surface through morphing, offering new degrees of freedom to enhance system performance. In this letter, we depart from prior works that rely on instantaneous channel state information (CSI) and instead address the problem of average sum spectral efficiency maximization under statistical CSI in a FIM-assisted downlink multiuser multiple-input single-output setting. To this end, we first derive the spatial correlation matrix for the FIM-aided transmitter and then propose an iterative FIM optimization algorithm based on the gradient projection method. Simulation results show that with statistical CSI, the FIM-aided system provides a significant performance gain over its RAA-based counterpart in scenarios with strong spatial channel correlation, whereas the gain diminishes when the channels are weakly correlated.