Programmable Metasurface Transmitter Aided Multicast Systems

This paper considers a multi-antenna multicast system with programmable metasurface (PMS) based transmitter. Taking into account of the finite-resolution phase shifts of PMSs, a novel beam training approach is proposed, which achieves comparable performance as the exhaustive beam searching method but with much lower time overhead. Then, a closed-form expression for the achievable individual rate is presented, which is valid for arbitrary system configurations. Besides, assuming a large number of reflecting elements, a simple approximated expression for the multicast rate is derived. A closed-form solution is obtained for the optimal power allocation scheme, and it is shown that equal power allocation is optimal when the number of reflecting elements is sufficiently large. The analytical findings indicate that, increasing the number of radio frequency (RF) chains or reflecting elements can significantly improve the multicast rate, and as the phase shift number becomes larger, the multicast rate improves first and gradually converges to a limit. Moreover, increasing the number of users would significantly degrade the multicast rate, but this rate loss can be compensated by implementing a large number of reflecting elements.