No Arabic abstract
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) comprised of tunable unit cells have recently drawn significant attention due to their superior capability in manipulating electromagnetic waves. In particular, RIS-assisted wireless communications have the great potential to achieve significant performance improvement and coverage enhancement in a cost-effective and energy-efficient manner, by properly programming the reflection coefficients of the unit cells of RISs. In this paper, free-space path loss models for RIS-assisted wireless communications are developed for different scenarios by studying the physics and electromagnetic nature of RISs. The proposed models, which are first validated through extensive simulation results, reveal the relationships between the free-space path loss of RIS-assisted wireless communications and the distances from the transmitter/receiver to the RIS, the size of the RIS, the near-field/far-field effects of the RIS, and the radiation patterns of antennas and unit cells. In addition, three fabricated RISs (metasurfaces) are utilized to further corroborate the theoretical findings through experimental measurements conducted in a microwave anechoic chamber. The measurement results match well with the modeling results, thus validating the proposed free-space path loss models for RIS, which may pave the way for further theoretical studies and practical applications in this field.
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) provide an interface between the electromagnetic world of the wireless propagation environment and the digital world of information science. Simple yet sufficiently accurate path loss models for RISs are an important basis for theoretical analysis and optimization of RIS-assisted wireless communication systems. In this paper, we refine our previously proposed free-space path loss model for RISs to make it simpler, more applicable, and easier to use. In the proposed path loss model, the impact of the radiation patterns of the antennas and unit cells of the RIS is formulated in terms of an angle-dependent loss factor. The refined model gives more accurate estimates of the path loss of RISs comprised of unit cells with a deep sub-wavelength size. The free-space path loss model of the sub-channel provided by a single unit cell is also explicitly provided. In addition, two fabricated RISs, which are designed to operate in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) band, are utilized to carry out a measurement campaign in order to characterize and validate the proposed path loss model for RIS-assisted wireless communications. The measurement results corroborate the proposed analytical model. The proposed refined path loss model for RISs reveals that the reflecting capability of a single unit cell is proportional to its physical aperture and to an angle-dependent factor. In particular, the far-field beamforming gain provided by an RIS is mainly determined by the total area of the surface and by the angles of incidence and reflection.
The future 6G of wireless communication networks will have to meet multiple requirements in increasingly demanding levels, either individually or in combinations in small groups. This trend has spurred recent research activities on transceiver hardware architectures and novel wireless connectivity concepts. Among the emerging wireless hardware architectures belong the Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs), which are artificial planar structures with integrated electronic circuits that can be programmed to manipulate an incoming ElectroMagnetic (EM) field in a wide variety of functionalities. Incorporating RISs in wireless networks has been recently advocated as a revolutionary means to transform any naturally passive wireless communication environment to an active one. This can be accomplished by deploying cost-effective and easy to coat RISs to the environments objects (e.g., building facades and indoor walls/ceilings), thus, offering increased environmental intelligence for the scope of diverse wireless networking objectives. In this paper, we first provide a brief history on wave propagation control for optics and acoustics, and overview two representative indoor wireless trials at 2.47GHz for spatial EM modulation with a passive discrete RIS. The first trial dating back to 2014 showcases the feasibility of highly accurate spatiotemporal focusing and nulling, while the second very recent one demonstrates that passive RISs can enrich multipath scattering, thus, enabling throughput boosted communication links. Motivated by the late research excitement on the RIS potential for intelligent EM wave propagation modulation, we describe the status on RIS hardware architectures and present key open challenges and future research directions for RIS design and RIS-empowered 6G wireless communications.
In this letter, we propose to employ reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) for enhancing the D2D underlaying system performance. We study the joint power control, receive beamforming, and passive beamforming for RIS assisted D2D underlaying cellular communication systems, which is formulated as a sum rate maximization problem. To address this issue, we develop a block coordinate descent method where uplink power, receive beamformer and refection phase shifts are alternatively optimized. Then, we provide the closed-form solutions for both uplink power and receive beamformer. We further propose a quadratic transform based semi-definite relaxation algorithm to optimize the RIS phase shifts, where the original passive beamforming problem is translated into a separable quadratically constrained quadratic problem. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed RIS assisted design significantly improves the sum-rate performance.
In this paper, we propose a novel wireless architecture, mounted on a high-altitude aerial platform, which is enabled by reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). By installing RIS on the aerial platform, rich line-of-sight and full-area coverage can be achieved, thereby, overcoming the limitations of the conventional terrestrial RIS. We consider a scenario where a sudden increase in traffic in an urban area triggers authorities to rapidly deploy unmanned-aerial vehicle base stations (UAV- BSs) to serve the ground users. In this scenario, since the direct backhaul link from the ground source can be blocked due to several obstacles from the urban area, we propose reflecting the backhaul signal using aerial-RIS so that it successfully reaches the UAV-BSs. We jointly optimize the placement and array-partition strategies of aerial-RIS and the phases of RIS elements, which leads to an increase in energy-efficiency of every UAV-BS. We show that the complexity of our algorithm can be bounded by the quadratic order, thus implying high computational efficiency. We verify the performance of the proposed algorithm via extensive numerical evaluations and show that our method achieves an outstanding performance in terms of energy-efficiency compared to benchmark schemes.
Over-the-air computation (AirComp) is a disruptive technique for fast wireless data aggregation in Internet of Things (IoT) networks via exploiting the waveform superposition property of multiple-access channels. However, the performance of AirComp is bottlenecked by the worst channel condition among all links between the IoT devices and the access point. In this paper, a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted AirComp system is proposed to boost the received signal power and thus mitigate the performance bottleneck by reconfiguring the propagation channels. With an objective to minimize the AirComp distortion, we propose a joint design of AirComp transceivers and RIS phase-shifts, which however turns out to be a highly intractable non-convex programming problem. To this end, we develop a novel alternating minimization framework in conjunction with the successive convex approximation technique, which is proved to converge monotonically. To reduce the computational complexity, we transform the subproblem in each alternation as a smooth convex-concave saddle point problem, which is then tackled by proposing a Mirror-Prox method that only involves a sequence of closed-form updates. Simulations show that the computation time of the proposed algorithm can be two orders of magnitude smaller than that of the state-of-the-art algorithms, while achieving a similar distortion performance.