SE and EE Tradeoff in Active STAR-RIS Assisted Systems With Hardware Impairments

Abstract: This paper investigates the problem of resource efficiency maximization in an active simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) assisted communication system under practical transceiver hardware impairments (HWIs). We aim to obtain an optimal tradeoff between system spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE), by jointly optimizing the base station (BS) transmit beamforming and the active STAR-RIS beamforming. To tackle the challenges in the fractional objective function, we begin by applying the quadratic transformation method to simplify it into a manageable form. An alternating optimization-based algorithm is then developed to iteratively update the BS and STAR-RIS beamforming coefficients. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme performs better than other baseline schemes in the presence of HWIs. Moreover, the variation of the achievable SE-EE region with different transmit power budgets is analyzed.