Dimension Reduced Channel Feedback for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Aided Wireless Communications

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has recently received extensive research interest due to its capability to intelligently change the wireless propagation environment. For RIS-aided wireless communications in frequency division duplex (FDD) mode, channel feedback at the user equipment (UE) is essential for the base station (BS) to acquire the downlink channel state information (CSI). In this paper, a dimension reduced channel feedback scheme is proposed to reduce the channel feedback overhead by exploiting the single-structured sparsity of BS-RIS-UE cascaded channel. Since different UEs share the same sparse BS-RIS channel but have their respective RIS-UE channels, there are only limited non-zero column vectors in the BS-RIS-UE cascaded channel matrix, and different UEs share the same indexes of the non-zero columns. Thus, the downlink CSI can be decomposed into
user-independent
channel information (i.e., the indexes of non-zero columns) and
user-specific
channel information (i.e., the non-zero column vectors), where the former for all UEs can be fed back by only one UE, while the latter can be fed back with a fairly low overhead by different UEs, respectively. Simulation results show that, compared with the conventional method, the proposed scheme can reduce channel feedback overhead by more than 80% for RIS-aided wireless communications.