STAR-RIS-Enabled Multi-Path Beam Routing with Passive Beam Splitting
Bonan An, Weidong Mei, Yuanwei Liu, Dong Wang, Zhi Chen
TL;DR
The paper tackles enhancing wireless coverage by leveraging STAR-RISs to enable multi-hop, multi-path LoS beam routing with passive beam splitting. It develops a unified signal model and derives closed-form solutions for BS active beamforming and STAR-RIS phase/amplitude design for a given path, proving that the maximum end-to-end power equals the sum over selected paths; this insight simplifies path selection. A clique-based method, employing Yen's algorithm and Bron-Kerbosch, efficiently solves the path-selection problem for the single-user case and extends to multi-user multicast with optimal power allocation to maximize the minimum user power. Numerical results show that STAR-RIS beam routing substantially outperforms conventional reflection-only RIS schemes by exploiting increased LoS diversity and cooperative passive beamforming gains. The work provides deployment and CSI-acquisition guidance and highlights future directions, including hybrid deployments, near-field routing, and joint node optimization for scalable STAR-RIS networks.
Abstract
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) can be densely deployed in the environment to create multi-reflection line-of-sight (LoS) links for signal coverage enhancement. However, conventional reflection-only RISs can only achieve half-space reflection, which limits the LoS path diversity. In contrast, simultaneously transmitting and reflecting RISs (STAR-RISs) can achieve full-space reflection and transmission, thereby creating more LoS paths. Hence, in this paper, we study a new multi-STAR-RIS-aided communication system, where a multi-antenna base station (BS) transmits to multiple single-antenna users by exploiting the signal beam routing over a set of cascaded LoS paths each formed by multiple STAR-RISs. To reveal essential insights, we first consider a simplified single-user case, aiming to maximize its received signal power by jointly optimizing the active beamforming at the BS, the BS's power allocation over different paths, the number of selected beam-routing paths, the selected STAR-RISs for each path, as well as their amplitude and phase shifts for transmission/reflection. However, this problem is difficult to be optimally solved as different paths may be intricately coupled at their shared STAR-RISs. To tackle this difficulty, we first derive the optimal solution to this problem in closed-form for a given set of paths. The clique-based approach in graph theory is then applied to solve the remaining multi-path selection problem efficiently. Next, we extend the proposed clique-based method to the multi-user case to maximize the minimum received signal power among all users, subject to additional constraints on the disjointness of the selected paths for different users. Simulation results show that our proposed STAR-RIS-enabled beam routing outperforms the conventional beam routing with reflection-only RISs in both single- and multi-user cases.