Progetto PRIN "INTRIGANTE"

"Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces Application to NOMA Systems"

Project Title: “Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces Application to NOMA Systems” (“INTRIGANTE”)
Research call: PRIN 2022 (D.D. n.104 del 02.02.2022)
Main ERC field: PE - Physical Sciences and Engineering (PE7)
Project funded by: Italian Ministry of University and Research (MUR) - Research Program of National Interest (PRIN) 2022
Project number: 20225CC9RW
Programmed duration: 24 months (2025-2027)
Start Date of Activities: 04 February 2025
Expected Completion Date of Activities: 03 February 2027
Scientific coordinator: Prof. Di Marco Piergiuseppe
Units Involved:

University of L'Aquila (scientific coordination of the project), PI and unit head: Prof. Piergiuseppe Di Marco
University of Basilicata, unit head: Dr. Luca Pallotta
Universiy of Trieste, unit head: Prof. Fulvio Babich

CUP generated by MUR: C53C24000780006
Total Costs: € 226.546
Total MUR Funding: € 167.046
MUR Contribution to the University of Basilicata: € 47.546
MUR Contribution to the University of L’Aquila: € 90.500
MUR Contribution to the University of Trieste: € 29.000

Motivation, challenges and objectives of the project:
The advent of 5G allows mobile broadband, time-critical operations, and low-energy machine-type communications (MTC) to flexibly coexist in the mobile network infrastructure. The next generation mobile network is expected to push towards integration of services and immersive communication, where users, machines, and objects interact seamlessly in the physical environment. There will be no strict separation between enhanced mobile broadband, purely massive MTC and purely ultra-reliable low latency communications (URLLC) in many emerging use cases (including vehicular communications, industrial-IoT, tactile internet). This calls for research efforts towards development of new schemes and a re-design of medium access and physical layer mechanisms, exploring all the flexibility to cope with heterogeneous and time-varying requirements. As we have technologies such as Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) for spectrum efficient radio access, backscattering communication (BackCom) for energy neutral data transfer, and advanced receivers for interference cancellation, the only component that is not yet flexibly controllable is the radio propagation environment. In this context, Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) has recently emerged as a promising new paradigm for the future 6G wireless communication systems. IRSs can be installed on large flat surfaces to reflect radio frequency (RF) energy around obstacles and create a virtual line-of-sight (LoS) propagation path between a source and the destination. By deploying IRSs densely in a wireless network and coordinating their reflections, the signal propagation/wireless channels between transmitters and receivers can be flexibly reconfigured and controlled, enabling an innovative approach that fundamentally exploits wireless channel fading impairment and interference issues, achieving a significant improvement in terms of reliability and system capacity. IRSs can be utilized to support radio communications but also sensing, localization, and wireless power transfer.

INTRIGANTE will look at the integration of NOMA systems with IRSs, to produce a unified analytical framework and a simulation environment that accounts for multiple access to the radio, channel propagation, mutual coupling in meta-surfaces, and interference cancellation at the receiver. A key strength of INTRIGANTE is the presence of competences that cover signal processing, wireless communications, and circuit analysis, to provide a unified view to the problem. The proposed approach will lead to new radio access solutions that exploit diversity, correlation, and redundancy of resources in new directions. As the 6G vision is still being developed by the mobile communications industry, there is a great potential to significantly anticipate and then inspire standardization directions within 3GPP, solidly contributing to scientific and technology innovation.

The overall main objective of INTRIGANTE is to construct a unified and flexible analytical and simulative framework that integrates the relevant electromagnetic characteristics of IRSs with the multiple access and propagation characteristics of NOMA systems, to exploit the full potentiality of building a reconfigurable radio propagation environment for C-ITS applications. The proposed approach will lead to new radio access solutions, deployment guidelines and parameter configurations that exploit diversity, correlation, and redundancy of resources in a comprehensive view.

The specific objectives of INTRIGANTE are summarized in the following.
Objective 1. Provide a model that accounts for the time characterization of IRS/RIS implementations and the impact to the achievable performance.
Objective 2. Provide an analytical framework to model NOMA communications with passive nodes and IRS elements.
Objective 3. Provide an analytical framework to model NOMA communications with IRSs and high mobility scenarios.
Objective 4. Provide a simulation framework that simultaneously accounts for the relevant electromagnetic features of IRS and the radio propagation.
Objective 5. Design deployment strategies and re-configuration strategies for IRSs in dense scenarios.
Objective 6. Study models and algorithms for multiple cooperative NOMA-IRS systems.
Objective 7. Identify relevant standardization actions and contributions to innovation toward 6G standard.