Interleaved Training for Intelligent Surface-Assisted Wireless Communications

In this letter, for outage performance orientated large intelligent surfaces (LISs)-assisted point to point wireless systems with severely blocked direct link and Rayleigh fading channels,we first propose a jointly interleaved training and transmission design. Then a semi-closed form expression is derived for the average training overhead. And it is shown to be upper bounded by the minimum between the LIS size and a value explicitly dependent on the target receiver signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). The upper bound gives the condition on the target SNR for achieving overhead saving compared to the full CSI scheme. And the overhead saving increases linearlywith the LIS size for constant target SNR. Non-negligible overhead saving is still available even though one increases the target SNR with larger LIS, e.g., as the square of the LIS size for fully exploiting the beamforming gain. Finally, we indicate the impact of practical phase quantization on the training and feedback overhead. Simulations verify these results and show that the proposed scheme can significantly reduce the training overhead without performance loss compared to the full CSI scheme.