No Arabic abstract
Reconfigurable intelligent surface has attracted the attention of academia and industry as soon as it appears because it can flexibly manipulate the electromagnetic characteristics of wireless channel. Especially in the past one or two years, RIS has been developing rapidly in academic research and industry promotion and is one of the key candidate technologies for 5G-Advanced and 6G networks. RIS can build a smart radio environment through its ability to regulate radio wave transmission in a flexible way. The introduction of RIS may create a new network paradigm, which brings new possibilities to the future network, but also leads to many new challenges in the technological and engineering applications. This paper first introduces the main aspects of RIS enabled wireless communication network from a new perspective, and then focuses on the key challenges faced by the introduction of RIS. This paper briefly summarizes the main engineering application challenges faced by RIS networks, and further analyzes and discusses several key technical challenges among of them in depth, such as channel degradation, network coexistence, network coexistence and network deployment, and proposes possible solutions.
Recently, significant research attention has been devoted to the study of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), which are capable of reconfiguring the wireless propagation environment by exploiting the unique properties of metamaterials-based integrated large arrays of inexpensive antennas. Existing research demonstrates that RISs significantly improve the physical layer performance, including the wireless coverage, achievable data rate and energy efficiency. However, the medium access control (MAC) of multiple users accessing an RIS-enabled channel is still in its infancy, while many open issues remain to be addressed. In this article, we present four typical RIS-aided multi-user scenarios with special emphasis on the MAC schemes. We then propose and elaborate upon centralized, distributed and hybrid artificial-intelligence (AI)-assisted MAC architectures in RIS-aided multi-user communications systems. Finally, we discuss some challenges, perspectives and potential applications of RISs as they are related to MAC design.
The intrinsic integration of the nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) techniques is envisioned to be a promising approach to significantly improve both the spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency for future wireless communication networks. In this paper, the physical layer security (PLS) for a RIS-aided NOMA 6G networks is investigated, in which a RIS is deployed to assist the two dead zone NOMA users and both internal and external eavesdropping are considered. For the scenario with only internal eavesdropping, we consider the worst case that the near-end user is untrusted and may try to intercept the information of far-end user. A joint beamforming and power allocation sub-optimal scheme is proposed to improve the system PLS. Then we extend our work to a scenario with both internal and external eavesdropping. Two sub-scenarios are considered in this scenario: one is the sub-scenario without channel state information (CSI) of eavesdroppers, and another is the sub-scenario where the eavesdroppers CSI are available. For the both sub-scenarios, a noise beamforming scheme is introduced to be against the external eavesdroppers. An optimal power allocation scheme is proposed to further improve the system physical security for the second sub-scenario. Simulation results show the superior performance of the proposed schemes. Moreover, it has also been shown that increasing the number of reflecting elements can bring more gain in secrecy performance than that of the transmit antennas.
Space information networks (SIN) are facing an ever-increasing thirst for high-speed and high-capacity seamless data transmission due to the integration of ground, air, and space communications. However, this imposes a new paradigm on the architecture design of the integrated SIN. Recently, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) and mobile edge computing (MEC) are the most promising techniques, conceived to improve communication and computation capability by reconfiguring the wireless propagation environment and offloading. Hence, converging RISs and MEC in SIN is becoming an effort to reap the double benefits of computation and communication. In this article, we propose an RIS-assisted collaborative MEC architecture for SIN and discuss its implementation. Then we present its potential benefits, major challenges, and feasible applications. Subsequently, we study different cases to evaluate the system data rate and latency. Finally, we conclude with a list of open issues in this research area.
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) or intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs), are regarded as one of the most promising and revolutionizing techniques for enhancing the spectrum and/or energy efficiency of wireless systems. These devices are capable of reconfiguring the wireless propagation environment by carefully tuning the phase shifts of a large number of low-cost passive reflecting elements. In this article, we aim for answering four fundmental questions: 1) Why do we need RISs? 2) What is an RIS? 3) What are RISs applications? 4) What are the relevant challenges and future research directions? In response, eight promising research directions are pointed out.
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising reflective radio technology for improving the coverage and rate of future wireless systems by reconfiguring the wireless propagation environment. The current work mainly focuses on the physical layer design of RIS. However, enabling multiple devices to communicate with the assistance of RIS is a crucial challenging problem. Motivated by this, we explore RIS-assisted communications at the medium access control (MAC) layer and propose an RIS-assisted MAC framework. In particular, RISassisted transmissions are implemented by pre-negotiation and a multi-dimension reservation (MDR) scheme. Based on this, we investigate RIS-assisted single-channel multi-user (SCMU) communications. Wherein the RIS regarded as a whole unity can be reserved by one user to support the multiple data transmissions, thus achieving high efficient RIS-assisted connections at the user. Moreover, under frequency-selective channels, implementing the MDR scheme on the RIS group division, RISassisted multi-channel multi-user (MCMU) communications are further explored to improve the service efficiency of the RIS and decrease the computation complexity. Besides, a Markov chain is built based on the proposed RIS-assisted MAC framework to analyze the system performance of SCMU/MCMU. Then the optimization problem is formulated to maximize the overall system capacity of SCMU/MCMU with energy-efficient constraint. The performance evaluations demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of each