Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Enhanced Massive Connectivity With Massive MIMO

This paper studies the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-enhanced channel estimation and device activity detection technique for the next generation massive internet of things (IoT) networks. Thanks to its low cost, RIS can be introduced into massive IoT networks to extend the area coverage and support more online devices. However, introducing RIS also brings new challenges in channel estimation and device detection for massive connectivity systems owning to the resulting cascaded channel and its inherent passive characteristics. To address this issue, we first formulate the RIS-aided channel estimation and device activity detection as a joint sparse signal recovery problem by simultaneously exploring the sparsity of sporadic transmission and RIS-aided channel links. After that, an RIS-aided generalized Turbo multiple measurement vector algorithm to estimate the channels between the devices and the base station, and detect the active devices jointly under different channel distributions, i.e., the Bernoulli Gaussian scale mixture distribution and the Bernoulli Gaussian approximation distribution. Furthermore, we analyze the state evolution equations of the proposed channel estimation technique and the theoretical detection results from the perspective of missing detection and false alarm probabilities are also provided. Numerical results confirm the correctness of the theoretical analysis, and show that RIS is beneficial for improving the mean square error performance of the channel estimators, as well as the active device detection performance of detectors in massive connectivity systems.