Location-Driven Beamforming for RIS-Assisted Near-Field Communications

Future wireless communications are promising to support ubiquitous connections and high data rates with cost-effective devices. Benefiting from the energy-efficient elements with low cost, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) emerges as a potential solution to fulfill such demands, which has the capability to flexibly manipulate the wireless signals with a tunable phase. Recently, as the operational frequency ascends to the sub-terahertz (THz) bands or higher bands for wireless communications in six-generation (6G), it becomes imperative to consider the near-field propagation in RIS-assisted communications. The challenging acquisition of channel parameters is an inherent issue for near-field RIS-assisted communications, where the complex design is essential to acquire the informative near-field channel embedded with both the angle and distance information. Hence, in this paper we systematically investigate the potential of exploiting location information for near-field RIS-assisted communications. Firstly, we present the progresses in the near-field RIS-assisted communications, which are compatible with existing wireless communications and show the potential to achieve the fine-grained localization accuracy to support location-driven scheme. Then, the Fresnel zone based model is introduced, with which the location-driven beamforming scheme and corresponding frame structure are developed. Also, we elaborate on four unique advantages for leveraging location information in RIS-assisted communications, followed by numerical simulations. Finally, several key challenges and corresponding potential solutions are pointed out.