Efficient Alternating Optimization for Hybrid Digital-Wave Beamforming in SIM-Assisted Cell-Free Massive MIMO

Abstract

Stacked intelligent metasurfaces (SIMs) have recently emerged as a promising architecture for large-scale beamforming systems, including cell-free massive MIMO (CF-mMIMO), due to their cost-effective wave-domain signal processing capabilities. However, existing algorithms for the joint optimization of digital and SIM-enabled wave-domain beamforming typically incur prohibitive computational complexity. In this work, we propose an efficient alternating optimization (AO) algorithm for weighted sum-rate maximization in SIM-assisted CF-mMIMO systems employing hybrid digital-wave beamforming. Unlike prior approaches that rely on general-purpose optimization solvers or per-element gradient ascent methods, the proposed algorithm updates the digital and wave-domain beamforming variables on a per-access point (AP) or per-SIM-layer basis, enabling closed-form updates at each step. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm reduces the computational complexity by more than 99% compared to existing algorithms while achieving nearly identical sum-rate performance.