Beamforming Design with Partial Channel Estimation and Feedback for FDD RIS-Assisted Systems

Beamforming design with partial channel estimation and feedback for frequency-division duplexing (FDD) reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted systems is considered in this paper. We leverage the observation that path angle information (PAI) varies more slowly than path gain information (PGI). Then, several dominant paths are selected among all the cascaded paths according to the known PAI for maximizing the spectral efficiency of downlink data transmission. To acquire the dominating path gain information (DPGI, also regarded as the path gains of selected dominant paths) at the base station (BS), we propose a DPGI estimation and feedback scheme by jointly beamforming design at BS and RIS. Both the required number of downlink pilot signals and the length of uplink feedback vector are reduced to the number of dominant paths, and thus we achieve a great reduction of the pilot overhead and feedback overhead. Furthermore, we optimize the active BS beamformer and passive RIS beamformer by exploiting the feedback DPGI to further improve the spectral efficiency. From numerical results, we demonstrate the superiority of our proposed algorithms over the conventional schemes.