  The Large Intelligent Surface (LIS) is a promising technology in the areas of
wireless communication, remote sensing and positioning. It consists of a
continuous radiating surface located in the proximity of the users, with the
capability to communicate by transmission and reception (replacing base
stations). Despite of its potential, there are numerous challenges from
implementation point of view, being the interconnection data-rate,
computational complexity, and storage the most relevant ones. In order to
address those challenges, hierarchical architectures with distributed
processing techniques are envisioned to to be relevant for this task, while
ensuring scalability. In this work we perform algorithm-architecture codesign
to propose two distributed interference cancellation algorithms, and a
tree-based interconnection topology for uplink processing. We also analyze the
performance, hardware requirements, and architecture tradeoffs for a discrete
LIS, in order to provide concrete case studies and guidelines for efficient
implementation of LIS systems.
