Intelligent metasurface has recently emerged as a promising technology that
enables the customization of wireless environments by harnessing large numbers
of inexpensive configurable scattering elements. However, prior studies have
predominantly focused on single-layer metasurfaces, which have limitations in
terms of the number of beam patterns they can steer accurately due to practical
hardware restrictions. In contrast, this paper introduces a novel stacked
intelligent metasurface (SIM) design. Specifically, we investigate the
integration of SIM into the downlink of a multiuser multiple-input
single-output (MISO) communication system, where a SIM, consisting of a
multilayer metasurface structure, is deployed at the base station (BS) to
facilitate transmit beamforming in the electromagnetic wave domain. This
eliminates the need for conventional digital beamforming and high-resolution
digital-to-analog converters at the BS. To this end, we formulate an
optimization problem that aims to maximize the sum rate of all user equipments
by jointly optimizing the transmit power allocation at the BS and the
wave-based beamforming at the SIM, subject to both the transmit power budget
and discrete phase shift constraints. Furthermore, we propose a computationally
efficient algorithm for solving this joint optimization problem and elaborate
on the potential benefits of employing SIM in wireless networks. Finally, the
numerical results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed SIM-enabled
wave-based beamforming design and evaluate the performance improvement achieved
by the proposed algorithm compared to various benchmark schemes. It is
demonstrated that considering the same number of transmit antennas, the
proposed SIM-based system achieves about 200\% improvement in terms of sum rate
compared to conventional MISO systems.Comment: 32 pages, 6 figures, submitted to IEEE TW