STAR-RIS-Enabled Multi-Path Beam Routing With Passive Beam Splitting

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) or intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) can be densely deployed in the environment to create multi-reflection line-of-sight (LoS) links between base stations (BS) and users, thereby significantly enhancing the BS coverage. However, conventional reflection-only RISs can only achieve half-space reflection, which limits the LoS path diversity. In contrast, simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (STAR-RISs) can split incident signals into reflected and transmitted signals pointing to different half spaces simultaneously, thereby creating more LoS paths. Hence, in this paper, we study a new multi-STAR-RIS-aided communication system, where a multi-antenna BS transmits to multiple single-antenna users by exploiting the signal beam routing over a set of cascaded LoS paths each formed by multiple STAR-RISs. To reveal essential insights, we first consider a simplified single-user case, aiming to maximize its received signal power by jointly optimizing the active beamforming at the BS, the BS's power allocation over different paths, the number of selected beam-routing paths, the selected STAR-RISs for each path, as well as their amplitude and phase shifts for transmission/reflection. However, this problem is particularly difficult to be optimally solved as different paths may be intricately coupled at their shared STAR-RISs. To tackle this difficulty, we first derive the optimal solutions to this problem in closed-form for a given set of paths. The clique-based approach in graph theory is then applied to solve the remaining multi-path selection problem efficiently. Next, we extend the proposed clique-based method to the more general multi-user case to maximize the minimum received signal power among all users, subject to additional constraints on the disjointness of the selected paths for different users. Simulation results show that our proposed STAR-RIS-enabled beam routing outperforms the conventional beam routing with reflection-only RISs in both single- and multi-user cases.