Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces Assisted UAV Communications
Abstract
In this paper, we investigate an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system assisted by stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs), which enable programmable wave-domain signal processing through multiple cascaded metasurface layers. By shifting part of the beamforming functionality from the RF/digital domain to the electromagnetic domain, SIMs allow the realization of energy-efficient hybrid beamforming architectures suitable for aerial platforms. We formulate the joint design of digital precoding, SIM phase configuration, and UAV positioning for multi-user downlink sum-rate maximization. To solve the resulting non-convex problem, we develop an alternating optimization framework that guarantees monotonic improvement of the objective. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed SIM-assisted architecture significantly improves spectral efficiency while maintaining low hardware complexity, and highlight the impact of the number of metasurface layers and size of each layer on system performance.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.24374,
title = {Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces Assisted UAV Communications},
author = {Chandan Kumar Sheemar and Giovanni Iacovelli and Sourabh Solanki and Wali Ullah Khan and Symeon Chatzinotas},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.24374},
year = {2026}
}