Channel state information estimation for reconfigurable intelligent surfaces based on received signal analysis

Recently, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces have an increasing role to enhance the coverage and quality of mobile networks especially when the received signal level is very weak because of obstacles and random fluctuation. This motivates the researchers to add more contributions to the fields of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) in wireless communications. A substantial issue in reconfigurable intelligent surfaces is the huge overhead for channel state information estimation which limits the system’s performance, oppressively. In this work, a newly proposed method is to estimate the angle of arrival and path loss at the RIS side and then send short information to the base station rather than huge overhead as in previous research. The estimated channel state information is used to beamform the downlink waveform toward users accurately. The simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithm calculated the angle of arrival of users, admirably especially at a high signal-to-noise ratio. Moreover, a considerable spectral efficiency enhancement is obtained as compared to the traditional methods.