When to Simply Use Passive RIS as Beamformer: An Information-Theoretic Analysis and a Novel Single-RF MIMO Transceiver Architecture

In this paper, for a single-input multiple-output (SIMO) system aided by a passive reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), the joint transmission accomplished by the single transmit antenna and the RIS with multiple controllable reflective elements is considered. Relying on a general capacity upper bound derived by using a maximum-trace argument, we respectively characterize the capacity slope of low-signal-to-noise-ratio channels and the exact capacity of rank-one channels, in which the optimal configuration of the RIS is proved to be beamforming-only with carefully-chosen phase shifts. To exploit the potential of modulating extra information on the RIS, by leveraging a strategy named partially beamforming and partially information-carrying based on QR decomposition and successive interference cancellation, we propose a novel transceiver architecture with only a single RF front end at the transmitter, by which the considered channel can be regarded as a concatenation of a vector Gaussian channel and several phase-modulated channels. Especially, we investigate a class of vector Gaussian channels with a hypersphere input support constraint, and not only generalize the existing result to arbitrary-dimensional real spaces but also present its high-order capacity asymptotics, by which both capacities of hypersphere-constrained channels and achievable rates of the proposed transceiver with two different signaling schemes can be well-approximated. Information-theoretic analyses show that the transceiver architecture designed for the SIMO channel has a boosted multiplexing gain, rather than one for the conventionally-used optimized beamforming scheme. Numerical results verify our derived asymptotic results and show notable superiority of the proposed transceiver as compared with the beamforming and the receive spatial modulation schemes.