In this paper, we consider the potential of data-transmission in a system
with a massive number of radiating and sensing elements, thought of as a
contiguous surface of electromagnetically active material. We refer to this as
a large intelligent surface (LIS). The "LIS" is a newly proposed concept, which
conceptually goes beyond contemporary massive MIMO technology, that arises from
our vision of a future where man-made structures are electronically active with
integrated electronics and wireless communication making the entire environment
"intelligent".
We consider capacities of single-antenna autonomous terminals communicating
to the LIS where the entire surface is used as a receiving antenna array. Under
the condition that the surface-area is sufficiently large, the received signal
after a matched-filtering (MF) operation can be closely approximated by a
sinc-function-like intersymbol interference (ISI) channel. We analyze the
capacity per square meter (m^2) deployed surface, \hat{C}, that is achievable
for a fixed transmit power per volume-unit, \hat{P}. Moreover, we also show
that the number of independent signal dimensions per m deployed surface is
2/\lambda for one-dimensional terminal-deployment, and \pi/\lambda^2 per m^2
for two and three dimensional terminal-deployments. Lastly, we consider
implementations of the LIS in the form of a grid of conventional antenna
elements and show that, the sampling lattice that minimizes the surface-area of
the LIS and simultaneously obtains one signal space dimension for every spent
antenna is the hexagonal lattice. We extensively discuss the design of the
state-of-the-art low-complexity channel shortening (CS) demodulator for
data-transmission with the LIS.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Trans. on Signal Process., 30 pages, 12 figure