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A promising type of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) employs tunable control of its varactors using biasing transmission lines below the RIS reflecting elements. Biasing standing waves (BSWs) are excited by a time-periodic signal and sampled at each RIS element to create a desired biasing voltage and control the reflection coefficients of the elements. A simple rectifier can be used to sample the voltages and capture the peaks of the BSWs over time. Like other types of RIS, attempting to model and accurately configure a wave-controlled RIS is extremely challenging due to factors such as device non-linearities, frequency dependence, element coupling, etc., and thus significant differences will arise between the actual and assumed performance. An alternative approach to solving this problem is data-driven: Using training data obtained by sampling the reflected radiation pattern of the RIS for a set of BSWs, a neural network (NN) is designed to create an input-output map between the BSW amplitudes and the resulting sampled radiation pattern. This is the approach discussed in this paper. In the proposed approach, the NN is optimized using a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to minimize the error between the estimated and measured radiation patterns. The BSW amplitudes are then designed via Simulated Annealing (SA) to optimize a signal-to-leakage-plus-noise ratio measure by iteratively forward-propagating the BSW amplitudes through the NN and using its output as feedback to determine convergence. The resulting optimal solutions are stored in a lookup table to be used both as settings to instantly configure the RIS and as a basis for determining more complex radiation patterns. 

While reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology shows great promise for wireless communication, an adversary using such technology can threaten wireless performance. This paper explores an RIS-based attack on time-division duplex (TDD) based wireless systems that use channel reciprocity for physical layer key generation (PLKG). We demonstrate that deploying a non-reciprocal RIS with a non-symmetric "beyond diagonal" (BD) phase shift matrix can compromise channel reciprocity and thus break key consistency. The attack can be achieved without transmission of signal energy, channel state information (CSI), and synchronization with the legitimate system, and thus it is difficult to detect and counteract. We propose a physically consistent BD-RIS model and verify the impact of its attack on the secret key rate (SKR) of the legitimate system via simulations. Moreover, we provide a heuristic approach for optimizing the BD-RIS configuration to realize a more severe attack in cases where some partial knowledge of the channel state information is available. Our results demonstrate that such channel reciprocity attacks can significantly decrease the SKR of the legitimate system. 

This article investigates block-level interference exploitation (IE) precoding for multiuser multiple-input-single-output (MU-MISO) downlink systems. To overcome the need for symbol-level IE precoding to frequently update the precoding matrix, we propose to jointly optimize all the precoders or transmit signals within a transmission block. The resultant precoders only need to be updated once per block, and while not necessarily constant over all the symbol slots, we refer to the technique as block-level slot-variant IE precoding. Through a careful examination of the optimal structure and the explicit duality inherent in block-level power minimization (PM) and signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) balancing (SB) problems, we discover that the joint optimization can be decomposed into subproblems with smaller variable sizes. As a step further, we propose block-level slot-invariant IE precoding by adding a structural constraint on the slot-variant IE precoding to maintain a constant precoder throughout the block. A novel linear precoder for IE is further presented, and we prove that the proposed slot-variant and slot-invariant IE precoding share an identical solution when the number of symbol slots does not exceed the number of users. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed precoders achieve a significant complexity reduction compared against benchmark schemes, without sacrificing performance. 

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology, given its ability to favorably modify wireless communication environments, will play a pivotal role in the evolution of future communication systems. This paper proposes rate maximization techniques for both single-user and multiuser MIMO systems, based on the well-known weighted minimum mean square error (WMMSE) criterion. Using a suitable weight matrix, the WMMSE algorithm tackles an equivalent weighted mean square error (WMSE) minimization problem to achieve the sum-rate maximization. By considering a more practical RIS system model that employs a tensor-based representation enforced by the electromagnetic behavior exhibited by the RIS panel, we detail both the sum-rate maximizing and WMSE minimizing strategies for RIS phase shift optimization by deriving the closed-form gradient of the sum-rate and the WMSE with respect to the RIS phase shift vector. Our simulations reveal that the proposed rate maximization technique, rooted in the WMMSE algorithm, exhibits superior performance when compared to other benchmarks. 

Joint device-to-device (D2D) and cellular communication is a promising technology for enhancing the spectral efficiency of future wireless networks. However, the interference management problem is challenging since the operating devices and the cellular users share the same spectrum. The emerging reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) technology is a potentially ideal solution for this interference problem since RISs can shape the wireless channel in desired ways. This paper considers an RIS-aided joint D2D and cellular communication system where the RIS is exploited to cancel interference to the D2D links and maximize the minimum signal-to-interference plus noise (SINR) of the device pairs and cellular users. First, we adopt a popular alternating optimization (AO) approach to solve the minimum SINR maximization problem. Then, we propose an interference cancellation (IC)-based approach whose complexity is much lower than that of the AO algorithm. We derive a representation for the RIS phase shift vector which cancels the interference to the D2D links. Based on this representation, the RIS phase shift optimization problem is transformed into an effective D2D channel optimization. We show that the AO approach can converge faster and can even give better performance when it is initialized by the proposed IC solution. We also show that for the case of a single D2D pair, the proposed IC approach can be implemented with limited feedback from the single receive device. 

Downlink reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted multi-input-multi-output (MIMO) systems are considered with far-field, near-field, and hybrid-far-near-field channels. According to the angular or distance information contained in the received signals, 1) a distance-based codebook is designed for near-field MIMO channels, based on which a hierarchical beam training scheme is proposed to reduce the training overhead; 2) a combined angular-distance codebook is designed for hybrid-far-near-field MIMO channels, based on which a two-stage beam training scheme is proposed to achieve alignment in the angular and distance domains separately. For maximizing the achievable rate while reducing the complexity, an alternating optimization algorithm is proposed to carry out the joint optimization iteratively. Specifically, the RIS coefficient matrix is optimized through the beam training process, the optimal combining matrix is obtained from the closed-form solution for the mean square error (MSE) minimization problem, and the active beamforming matrix is optimized by exploiting the relationship between the achievable rate and MSE. Numerical results reveal that: 1) the proposed beam training schemes achieve near-optimal performance with a significantly decreased training overhead; 2) compared to the angular-only far-field channel model, taking the additional distance information into consideration will effectively improve the achievable rate when carrying out beam design for near-field communications. 

This paper explores the use of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) in mitigating cross-system interference in spectrum sharing and secure wireless applications. Unlike conventional RIS that can only adjust the phase of the incoming signal and essentially reflect all impinging energy, or active RIS, which also amplify the reflected signal at the cost of significantly higher complexity, noise, and power consumption, an absorptive RIS (ARIS) is considered. An ARIS can in principle modify both the phase and modulus of the impinging signal by absorbing a portion of the signal energy, providing a compromise between its conventional and active counterparts in terms of complexity, power consumption, and degrees of freedom (DoFs). We first use a toy example to illustrate the benefit of ARIS, and then we consider three applications: 1) spectral coexistence of radar and communication systems, where a convex optimization problem is formulated to minimize the Frobenius norm of the channel matrix from the communication base station to the radar receiver; 2) spectrum sharing in device-to-device (D2D) communications, where a max-min scheme that maximizes the worst-case signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) among the D2D links is developed and then solved via fractional programming; 3) physical layer security of a downlink communication system, where the secrecy rate is maximized and the resulting nonconvex problem is solved by a fractional programming algorithm together with a sequential convex relaxation procedure. Numerical results are then presented to show the significant benefit of ARIS in these applications. 

This paper presents a novel parametric scattering model (PSM) for sensing extended targets in integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) systems. The PSM addresses the limitations of traditional models by efficiently capturing the target’s angular characteristics through a compact set of key parameters, including the central angle and angular spread, enabling efficient optimization. Based on the PSM, we first derive the Cram´er-Rao bound (CRB) for parameter estimation and then propose a beamforming design algorithm to minimize the CRB while meeting both communication signal-to-interference-plusnoise ratio (SINR) and power constraints. By integrating the PSM into the beamforming optimization process, the proposed framework achieves superior CRB performance while balancing the tradeoff between sensing accuracy and communication quality. Simulation results demonstrate that the PSM-based approach consistently outperforms traditional unstructured and discrete scattering models, particularly in resource-limited scenarios, highlighting its practical applicability and scalability.