Fluid Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Enabling Index Modulation
This work addresses performance limitations in reconfigurable intelligent surfaces for wireless communication, offering an incremental improvement through a novel integration of fluid antennas.
The paper tackled the problem of enhancing wireless communication performance by proposing a fluid reconfigurable intelligent surface (FRIS) framework that enables index modulation, achieving significant bit error rate (BER) gains over conventional RIS-assisted schemes as demonstrated in simulations.
Fluid reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (FRIS) enable joint position and phase reconfigurability by integrating fluid antennas (FA) with conventional reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS). In this paper, we propose a novel FRIS-based index modulation (IM) framework that exploits the additional spatial degrees of freedom introduced by FRIS element-position reconfiguration. Based on this framework, two transmission schemes are developed, namely FRIS-assisted receiver spatial modulation (FRIS-RSM) and receiver spatial shift keying (FRIS-RSSK), where information bits are conveyed through receiver-antenna index selection. The proposed framework supports both continuous and finite-bit phase control while accounting for FRIS-side spatial correlation. To balance detection complexity and bit error rate (BER) performance, a two-stage reduced-complexity list detector is proposed. For performance analysis under double-Rayleigh cascaded fading with strongest-link selection, tractable post-selection statistics are developed for both continuous-phase and quantized-phase FRIS and incorporated into a moment-generating-function (MGF)-based framework to derive unconditional pairwise error probability (UPEP) and union-bound BER expressions. Simulation results demonstrate significant BER gains over conventional RIS-assisted schemes and verify the accuracy of the analysis.