Uplink Wave-Domain Combiner for Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces Accounting for Hardware Limitations

Refractive metasurfaces (RMTSs) offer a promising solution to improve energy efficiency of wireless systems. To address the limitations of single-layer RMTS, stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs), which form the desired precoder and combiner in the wave domain, have been proposed. However, previous analyses overlooked hardware non-idealities that significantly affect SIM performance. In this paper, we study the achievable sum-rate of SIM antennas in an uplink scenario, accounting for hardware constraints. We propose a system model that includes noise and hardware effects, formulate a non-convex sum-rate optimization problem, and solve it using gradient ascent and interior point methods. We compare SIMs and digital phased arrays (DPAs) under Rayleigh fading and 3GPP channels with two conditions: equal number of RF chains and equal physical aperture size. Our results show SIMs outperform DPAs under equal number of RF chains but underperform DPAs with equal aperture size.