Energy Efficient Active Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces

Abstract

This letter investigates an energy-efficient active stacked intelligent metasurfaces (ASIM)-assisted downlink transmission framework, where a multi-antenna base station (BS) serves multiple users through a multi-layer metasurface architecture. Unlike conventional passive intelligent surfaces, the considered ASIM employs active amplification and multiple transmissive layers to enhance electromagnetic wave manipulation. We aim to maximize the system energy efficiency (EE) by jointly optimizing the BS beamforming and ASIM configurations under user quality-of-service and amplification constraints. The resulting problem is highly coupled and non-convex due to the cascaded near-field channel and multi-layer metasurface structure. To address this challenge, we first transform the original problem through Dinkelbach and Lagrangian dual transformations. An alternative optimization framework is then developed, where the BS beamforming subproblem is solved via successive convex approximation (SCA), while the ASIM configuration is optimized using Bayesian optimization based on a Gaussian process surrogate model. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly improves the achievable EE compared to conventional passive SIM and heuristic benchmark methods. Furthermore, the impacts of amplification capability, number of metasurface layers, and inter-layer spacing on system performance are investigated, providing useful design insights for future active metasurface-assisted wireless networks.