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AI-Driven Design of Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces for Software-Defined Radio Applications

Signal Processing 2026-05-26 v1

Abstract

The integration of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) into future wireless communication systems offers promising capabilities in dynamic environment shaping and spectrum efficiency. In this work, we present a consistent implementation of a stacked intelligent metasurface (SIM) model within the NVIDIA's AI-native framework Sionna for 6G physical layer research. Our implementation allows simulation and learning-based optimization of SIM-assisted communication channels in fully differentiable and GPU-accelerated environments, enabling end-to-end training for cognitive and software-defined radio (SDR) applications. We describe the architecture of the SIM model, including its integration into the TensorFlow-based pipeline, and showcase its use in closed-loop learning scenarios involving adaptive beamforming and dynamic reconfiguration. Benchmarking results are provided for various deployment scenarios, highlighting the model's effectiveness in enabling intelligent control and signal enhancement in non-terrestrial-network (NTN) propagation environments. This work demonstrates a scalable, modular approach for incorporating intelligent metasurfaces into modern AI-accelerated SDR systems and paves the way for future hardware-in-the-loop experiments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.20795,
  title  = {AI-Driven Design of Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces for Software-Defined Radio Applications},
  author = {Ivan Iudice and Giacinto Gelli and Donatella Darsena},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.20795},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

8 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in the proceedings of 2026 IEEE Aerospace Conference