Small-Scale Spatial-Temporal Correlation and Degrees of Freedom for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

The reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is an emerging promising candidate technology for future wireless networks, where the element spacing is usually of sub-wavelength. Only limited knowledge, however, has been gained about the spatial-temporal correlation behavior among the elements in an RIS. In this letter, we investigate the spatial-temporal correlation for an RIS-enabled wireless communication system. Specifically, a joint small-scale spatial-temporal correlation model is derived under isotropic scattering, which can be represented by a four-dimensional sinc function. Furthermore, based upon the spatial-only correlation at a certain time instant, an essential RIS property – the spatial degrees of freedom (DoF) – is revisited, and an analytical expression is propounded to characterize the spatial DoF for RISs with realistic hence non-infinitesimal element spacing and finite aperture sizes. The results are vital to the accurate evaluation of various system performance metrics.