RIS-Assisted Massive Access with Semi-Passive Elements

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has been recently regarded as a disruptive candidate technology for enabling next generation wireless communication. It can establish favorable propagation environment to facilitate low-power and spectrally efficient data transmission, possessing attractive potential to support massive access. However, the required activity detection and channel estimation for RIS-assisted massive access is quite challenging due to the passive nature of the conventional reflecting elements. To this end, this paper considers massive access for RIS-assisted communication systems with semi-passive elements, which can operate in sensing mode for receiving signals. Then, by exploiting the sparsity of the RIS-BS channel in the virtual angular domain as well as the sporadic transmission of massive connectivity, we formulate the joint activity detection and channel estimation as a special bilinear recovery problem, which is a combination of sparse matrix factorization, compressed sensing (CS)-based generalized multiple measurement vector (GMMV) problem and matrix completion. Furthermore, we propose a novel hierarchical message passing-based algorithm to address the problem, in which approximate message passing (AMP)-based approximations are adopted to reduce the computational complexity. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and its superior performance compared with state-of-the-art baseline schemes.