Dynamic Metasurface Antennas for Energy Efficient Massive MIMO Uplink Communications

Future wireless communications are largely inclined to deploy a massive number of antennas at the base stations (BS) by exploiting energy-efficient and environmentally friendly technologies. An emerging technology called dynamic metasurface antennas (DMAs) is promising to realize such massive antenna arrays with reduced physical size, hardware cost, and power consumption. This paper aims to optimize the energy efficiency (EE) performance of DMAs-assisted massive MIMO uplink communications. We propose an algorithmic framework for designing the transmit precoding of each multi-antenna user and the DMAs tuning strategy at the BS to maximize the EE performance, considering the availability of the instantaneous and statistical channel state information (CSI), respectively. Specifically, the proposed framework includes Dinkelbach's transform, alternating optimization, and deterministic equivalent methods. In addition, we obtain a closed-form solution to the optimal transmit signal directions for the statistical CSI case, which simplifies the corresponding transmission design. The numerical results show good convergence performance of our proposed algorithms as well as considerable EE performance gains of the DMAs-assisted massive MIMO uplink communications over the baseline schemes.