TAIS: Transparent Amplifying Intelligent Surface for Indoor-to-Outdoor mmWave Communications

This paper presents a novel transparent amplifying intelligent surface (TAIS) architecture for uplink enhancement in indoor-to-outdoor mmWave communications. The TAIS is an amplifier-based transmissive intelligent surface that can refract and amplify the incident signal, instead of only refracting it with adjustable phase shift by most passive reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS). With advanced indium tin oxide film and printing technology, TAIS can be fabricated on the windows without any visual effects. This paper primarily focuses on exploiting the TAIS-based architecture to boost the uplink spectral efficiency (SE) in indoor-to-outdoor mmWave communications. By jointly optimizing the TAIS’s phase shift matrix and transmit power of the user equipment, the uplink SE can be maximized by exploiting the nonlinearity in the TAIS’s amplification process. The key enabler is that we drive the optimal phase shift matrix that maximizes the SE and deduces its closed-form representation. The SE maximization is then proved to be transferred to the transmit power optimization problem. Another important enabler is that we design a low-complexity algorithm to solve the optimization problem using the difference of convex programming. Moreover, the asymptotic spectral efficiency under nonlinear amplification and power scaling law with infinitely large elements under both the sparse and rich scattering channel models are analyzed. Simulation results show that our proposed TAIS can increase the SE by up to 24.7% as compared to its alternative methods.