Multi-User Opportunistic Beamforming using Reconfigurable Surfaces

Multi-user (MU) diversity yields sum-rate gains by scheduling a user for transmission at times when its channel is near its peak. The only information required at the base station (BS) for scheduling is the users' signal-to-noise ratios (SNR)s. MU diversity gains are limited in environments with line-of-sight (LoS) channel components and/or spatial correlation. To remedy this, previous works have proposed opportunistic beamforming (OBF) using multiple antennas at the BS to transmit the same signal, modulated by time-varying gains, to the best user at each time slot. In this paper, we propose reconfigurable surface (RS)-assisted OBF to increase the range of channel fluctuations in a single-antenna broadcast channel (BC), where opportunistic scheduling (OS) strategy achieves the sum-rate capacity. The RS is abstracted as an array of passive reflecting elements, and is dumb in the sense that it only induces random phase shifts onto the impinging electromagnetic waves, without requiring any channel state information. We develop the sum-rate scaling laws under Rayleigh, Rician and correlated Rayleigh fading and show that RS-assisted OBF with only a single-antenna BS outperforms multi-antenna BS-assisted OBF. We also extend our results to OFDMA systems and the multi-antenna BC.