Signal Processing Foundations of Reconfigurable Antennas in the Tri-Hybrid MIMO Architecture

To enable larger apertures in multipleinput multipleoutput MIMO systems the trihybrid MIMO architecture offers a promising lowcost and lowpower solution by introducing reconfigurable antennas as a third layer of precoding on top of conventional digital and analog processing In this paper we develop a unified signal processing framework for trihybrid MIMO that explicitly captures the electromagnetic EM characteristics of diverse reconfigurable antenna technologies We first propose a generic inputoutput model that incorporates the reconfigurable antenna layer into an effective channel representation revealing a fundamental coupling between the channel precoder and radiated power Building on this model we formulate a general optimization problem that jointly accounts for digital analog and antennadomain precoding under hardware and power constraints We then instantiate this framework across seven representative reconfigurable antenna architectures including parasitic arrays dynamic metasurface antennas fluidpixel antennas polarizationreconfigurable antennas stacked intelligent metasurfaces pinching antenna systems and nonradiating wires To systematically compare these heterogeneous architectures we introduce a new metric the reconfigurability efficiency factor REF which quantifies the performance gains achievable through antenna reconfiguration under realistic constraints Numerical results demonstrate the tradeoffs among aperture size power consumption hardware complexity and spectral efficiency Our results establish that EMlevel reconfiguration reshapes the signal processing design space highlighting the need for new architectures and algorithms that jointly optimize across digital analog and electromagnetic domains This work reveals that electromagnetic reconfiguration couples the channel and precoder