Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Enabled Interference Nulling and Signal Power Maximization in mmWave Bands

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has emerged as a promising mean to enhance wireless transmission. The effective reflected paths provided by RIS are able to alleviate the susceptibility to blockage effects, especially in high-frequency band communications, where signals experience severe path loss and high directivity. This paper is concerned with an RIS-assisted system over the millimeter wave (mmWave) channel characterized by sparse propagation paths. A base station tries to connect with the desired user through an RIS, while the undesired user can also receive the signal transmitted from BS unavoidably, which is treated as the interference signal. All terminals are assumed to be equipped with a single antenna for the sake of simplicity. The paper aims to propose an appropriate design of the phase shifts of each element at the RIS so as to maximize the received signal power transmitted from the base station (BS) at the desired user, while nulling the received interference signal power at the undesired user. The proposed reflecting design relies on the decomposition of the reflecting beamforming vectors and all channel path vectors into Kronecker product of factors being uni-modulus vectors. By exploiting characteristics of Kronecker mixed products, different factors of the reflecting are designed for either nulling the interference signal at the undesired user, or coherently combining data paths at the desired user. Furthermore, a channel estimation strategy is proposed to enable the proposed reflecting beamforming design. The magnitude, azimuth, and elevation arrival and departure angles of desired and undesired paths are estimated by an efficient 2-dimension (2-D) line spectrum optimization technique based on the atomic norm minimization (ANM) framework. The performance of the reflecting designs and channel estimation scheme is analyzed and demonstrated by simulation results.