Wideband Channel Capacity Maximization With Beyond Diagonal RIS Reflection Matrices
Özlem Tuğfe Demir, Emil Björnson
Abstract
Following the promising beamforming gains offered by reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), a new hardware architecture, known as beyond diagonal RIS (BD-RIS), has recently been proposed. This architecture enables controllable signal flows between the RIS elements, thereby providing greater design flexibility. However, the physics-imposed symmetry and orthogonality conditions on the non-diagonal reflection matrix make the design challenging. In this letter, we analyze how a BD-RIS can improve a wideband channel, starting from fundamental principles and deriving the capacity. Our analysis considers the effects of various channel taps and their frequency-domain characteristics. We introduce a new algorithm designed to optimize the configuration of the BD-RIS to maximize wideband capacity. The proposed algorithm has better performance than the benchmarks. A BD-RIS is beneficial compared to a conventional RIS in the absence of static path or when the Rician <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\kappa $ </tex-math></inline-formula>-factor is smaller than 5dB.