Beam tracking method based on reconfigurable intelligent surface for obstructed communication

Abstract This paper proposes a new reconfigurable intelligent surface based three-dimensional beam tracking method to solve the beam tracking problems for the unmanned aerial vehicle with obstacles in communication channels. The proposed beam tracking method can not only regulate the reconfigurable intelligent surfaces to achieve the beam tracking of the obstructed communications, but also optimize the transmission efficiency of the communication. Firstly, a reconfigurable intelligent surface is proposed, which can correlate the transmission signals by adjusting the phase-shift matrix. Meanwhile, a new communication channel is constructed according to the reconfigurable intelligent surface, which consists of two parts. The first one is the channel between the unmanned aerial vehicle and the reconfigurable intelligent surface, the other is the channel between the reconfigurable intelligent surface and the ground base station. Note that the transmission performance of the communications can be optimized by adjusting the phase shift of each uniform linear array on the reconfigurable intelligent surface. Then, a new beam tracking method for the unmanned aerial vehicle with obstructed communications is proposed on the basis of the reconfigurable intelligent surface. By proposing the mixed genetic algorithm, the estimation accuracy of the azimuth and elevation angles is improved to enhance the performance of the beam tracking. Finally, the simulations are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed three-dimensional beam tracking method with reconfigurable intelligent surface.