An Electromagnetic Framework for the Deployment of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces to Control Massive MIMO Channel Characteristics

In this paper, we deploy a full-wave FDTD paradigm to investigate the effect of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) – switchable frequency-selective surfaces (FSS) – on generic massive MIMO uplink channel’s eigenspace structure. We place an RIS based on two switchable FSS layers in the vicinity of a 64-element massive MIMO base-station (BS) array, serving a cluster of four fixed user equipment (UE) units. Utilizing an electromagnetic tool based on time-averaged Poynting flow developed recently by the authors, we demonstrate how the illumination of BS-array aperture can be controlled by the intentional deployment of various switching states in the RIS placed near the BS. We show that such supplementary RIS structures may assist the wireless link engineer in deterministically “customizing” the uplink channel behaviour by selectively enhancing/suppressing certain channel eigenvalues.

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