Robust Beamforming for Active Reconfigurable Intelligent Omni-Surface in Vehicular Communications

Two key impediments to reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided vehicular communications are, respectively, the double fading experienced by the signal on RIS-aided cascaded links and the high-mobility-induced intractability of acquiring channel state information (CSI). To overcome these challenges, a novel kind of RIS is presented in this paper, namely active reconfigurable intelligent omni-surface (RIOS), each element of which is supported by active loads, that concurrently transmits and reflects the incident signal amplified rather than just reflecting it as compared to the case of a passive reflecting-only RIS. We consider the use of an active RIOS to a vehicular communication system for mitigating double fading effect. Specifically, the active RIOS is mounted on the vehicle window to enhance transmission for users in the vehicle and for adjacent vehicles. We aim to jointly optimize the transmit precoding matrix at the base station (BS) and RIOS coefficient matrices to minimize the BS’s transmit power relying exclusively upon the imperfect knowledge of the large-scale CSI. To significantly relax the frequency of channel information updates, initially an efficient transmission protocol is put forward to reap the high active RIOS beamforming gain with low channel training overhead by appropriately tailoring the time-scale of CSI acquisition. Then, two algorithms, namely an alternating optimization (AO)-based algorithm and a constrained stochastic successive convex approximation (CSSCA)-based algorithm, are developed to tackle with the investigated resource allocation problem, whose pros and cons are elaborated, respectively. Simulation results substantiate the significant performance improvement of active RIOS as well as determine the validity and robustness of our proposed algorithms over various benchmark schemes.