Dynamic Agile Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Antenna (DARISA) MIMO: DoF Analysis and Effective DoF Optimization

In this paper, we propose a dynamic agile reconfigurable intelligent surface antenna (DARISA) array integrated into multi-input multi-output (MIMO) transceivers. Each DARISA comprises a number of metasurface elements activated simultaneously via a parallel feed network. The proposed system enables rapid and intelligent phase response adjustments for each metasurface element within a single symbol duration, facilitating a dynamic agile adjustment of phase response (DAAPR) strategy. By analyzing the theoretical degrees of freedom (DoF) of the DARISA MIMO system under the DAAPR framework, we derive an explicit relationship between DoF and critical system parameters, including agility frequentness (i.e., the number of phase adjustments of metasurface elements during one symbol period), cluster angular spread of wireless channels, DARISA array size, and the number of transmit/receive DARISAs. The DoF result reveals a significant conclusion: when the number of receive DARISAs is smaller than that of transmit DARISAs, the DAAPR strategy of the DARISA MIMO enhances the overall system DoF. Furthermore, relying on DoF alone to measure channel capacity is insufficient, so we analyze the effective DoF (EDoF) that reflects the impacts of the DoF and channel matrix singular value distribution on capacity. We show channel capacity monotonically increases with EDoF, and optimize the agile phase responses of metasurface elements by using fractional programming (FP) and semidefinite relaxation (SDR) algorithms to maximize the EDoF. Simulations validate the theoretical DoF gains and reveal that increasing agility frequentness, metasurface element density, and phase quantization accuracy can enhance the EDoF. Additionally, densely deployed elements can compensate for the loss in communication performance caused by lower phase quantization accuracy.