An Improved Path-Loss Model for Reconfigurable-Intelligent-Surface-Aided Wireless Communications and Experimental Validation

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) provide an interface between the electromagnetic world of wireless propagation environments 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. The impact of the antenna's directivity of the transmitter, receiver, and the unit cells of the RIS on the path loss is explicitly formulated as 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. Based on the proposed model, the properties of a single unit cell are evaluated in terms of scattering performance, power consumption, and area, which allows us to unveil fundamental considerations for deploying RISs in high frequency bands. Two fabricated RISs operating in the millimeter-wave (mmWave) band are utilized to carry out a measurement campaign. The measurement results are shown to be in good agreement with the proposed path loss model. In addition, the experimental results suggest an effective form to characterize the power radiation pattern of the unit cell for path loss modeling.

In recent years, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have attracted significant attention from both academia and industry due to their ability to manipulate electromagnetic waves in wireless communication. In particular, the characteristics of wireless channels incorporating RISs offer substantial research value. Several previous studies have investigated the path loss characteristics of RIS-assisted wireless channels in practical scenarios. However, these pioneering studies ignore the effect of RIS array gain on path loss. This paper proposes a floating-intercept (FI) path loss model that includes the array gain of the RIS, the distance between the transmitter and the RIS, and the distance between the receiver and the RIS. In this RIS-FI model, the RIS array gain component is related to the reflection coefficients of all the unit cells of RIS. The proposed model can effectively characterize path loss in both the far-field and near-field regions of the RIS. A fabricated 512-element RIS and a vector network analyzer (VNA) are utilized to set up the channel measurement system. The proposed RIS-FI path loss model is validated by using measurement data collected from multiple scenarios, including outdoor square, indoor corridor, and classroom. Compared to other RIS path loss models, the experimental results show that the proposed model offers better accuracy in describing path loss in the near-field region of the RIS. The RIS-FI path loss model presented in this paper may pave the way for further research on RIS-assisted wireless channels.

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) have emerged as a transformative solution for next-generation wireless networks, offering a low-power and cost-efficient means of controlling electromagnetic wave propagation. Through the integration of tunable elements within engineered metasurfaces, RIS can dynamically adjust the phase, amplitude, or polarization of incoming signals, enabling flexible and programmable wireless environments suitable for <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{5 G}, \mathbf{6 G}$</tex>, and beyond. In this work, an active 1-bit RIS unit cell is designed and analyzed using full-wave simulation, featuring a PIN diode as the rapid switching element. The active configuration supports binary phase modulation, providing two discrete reflection states determined by the diode bias condition. The unit cell is further optimized to yield an approximately 180° phase shift between the ON and OFF states, with a tolerance of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\pm 20^{\circ}$</tex> at <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{4. 6 ~ G H z}$</tex>, ensuring reliable and consistent operation at the intended frequency. Simulation results verify that the use of the PIN diode enables fast and efficient reconfigurability without compromising compactness or practical implementability. These outcomes advance ongoing RIS research and establish a solid platform for future hardware fabrication, prototyping, and experimental validation.

In this paper, we discuss the new challenges and solutions of managing spectrum in 6G wireless communications when unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) base stations are equipped with and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). UAV-aided communications can help meet the dynamic traffic demand of mobile crowds. However, the extreme quality of service (QoS) requirement in 6G mobile network poses several challenges of low energy-efficient and insufficient link capacity for UAV communications. However, UAV base station cause the coverage overlapping issues in 3D cellular network and face the energy-limited issue. RIS can adjust the phase shift, amplitude, polarization, and frequency of the incident electromagnetic wave to improve spectral efficiency and reduce interference. The other important spectrum management issue in 6G wireless is to design the efficient and effective spectrum sharing mechanism in a co-existing environment with enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB), ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLCs) and massive machine-type communications (mMTCs) traffic flows. The state of the art data-driven deployment strategies and learning-based spectrum management techniques for 6G wireless are surveyed in this paper.

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) is one of the promising techniques for 6G wireless communications, and recently has also been shown to be able to improve secure communications. However, there is a “double fading” effect in the reflection link between base station and user, thus passive RIS only achieves a negligible secrecy gain in typical communications scenarios. In this letter, we propose an active RIS-aided multi-antenna physical layer secrecy transmission scheme, where the active RIS can amplify the signal actively. Our aim is to minimize the transmit power subject to the constraint of secrecy rate. To solve the non-convex optimization problem, a penalty-based alternating minimization (AltMin) algorithm is proposed to optimize both the beamformer at the transmitter and the reflection matrix at RIS. Simulation results show that active RIS can resist the impact of “double fading” effect effectively, and is more energy efficient than passive RIS.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided wireless communications systems are one the promising wireless communication system where the wave can be guided by the RIS. It is envisioned that beyond-5G/6G communication will have a low-cost, high spectral efficiency, high energy efficiency, and smart wireless environment. In this paper, initially, different measurement techniques of the RIS have been discussed, which are available in the literature. Then, a new type of RIS has been proposed. Finally, a different parameter measurement technique for our proposed RIS has been presented. A low-cost FR4 substrate with a height of 1.6 mm was considered to design the RIS in the sub-6 GHz frequency band. Another important thing is that our proposed IRS is a single-layer substrate backed by a copper plate. The area of each unit cell was 42 mm × 42 mm. The RIS was designed to operate at the central frequency of the 3.5 GHz frequency band. The novelty of the proposed RIS is that it is a polarization-independent structure. Thus, polarization-related losses can be overcome using this structure. A 10×10-unit cell array was designed to check the radiation performance. The magnitude of the reflection coefficients was measured in our laboratory for the proposed configuration.

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has emerged as a promising technology for sixth-generation (6G) communication networks. At the same time, ensuring the privacy of targets in ISAC is important in contexts where a malicious sensor is present. In this paper, we investigate a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted ISAC system designed to protect a sensing region against an adversarial detector (AD), where the base station (BS) has imperfect knowledge of the AD’s location. The RIS consists of both reflecting and absorptive elements (the latter serving as sensing elements), which can be adaptively reconfigured to meet system requirements. Specifically, the system is designed to maximize the jamming power from the BS to the AD by jointly optimizing the transmit beamformer at the BS, the RIS phase-shift matrix, the receive beamformer at the RIS, and the allocation between reflecting and absorptive elements at the RIS while ensuring a minimum sensing signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) at sample points within the sensing region, as well as a minimum communication SINR for each user. To address this challenging optimization problem, we propose an alternating optimization framework combined with a successive convex approximation method tailored for each subproblem. Our results show that the proposed system model offers significant protection of the sensing area compared to the case where the target privacy is not considered. Simulations also confirm that the proposed adaptive RIS partitioning outperforms the fixed RIS partitioning approach.

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is promising for future 6G wireless communications. However, the increased number of RIS elements results in the high overhead for channel acquisition and the non-negligible power consumption. Therefore, how to improve the system capacity with limited RIS elements is essential. Unlike the classical regular RIS whose elements are arranged on a regular grid, in this paper, we propose an irregular RIS structure to improve the system capacity. The key idea is to irregularly configure a given number of RIS elements on an enlarged surface, which provides extra spatial degrees of freedom compared with the regular RIS. In this way, the received signal power can be enhanced, and thus the system capacity can be improved. Then, we formulate a joint topology and precoding optimization problem to maximize the capacity for irregular RIS-aided communication systems. Accordingly, a joint optimization algorithm with low complexity is proposed to alternately optimize the RIS topology and the precoding design. Particularly, a tabu search-based method is used to design the irregular RIS topology, and a neighbor extraction-based cross-entropy method is introduced to optimize the precoding design. Simulation results demonstrate that, subject to the constraint of limited RIS elements, the proposed irregular RIS can significantly enhance the system capacity.

With the development of the next generation of mobile networks, new research challenges have emerged, and new technologies have been proposed to address them. On the other hand, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology is being investigated for partially controlling wireless channels. RIS is a promising technology for improving signal quality by controlling the scattering of electromagnetic waves in a nearly passive manner. Heterogeneous networks (HetNets) are another promising technology that is designed to meet the capacity requirements of the network. RIS technology can be used to improve system performance in the context of HetNets. This study investigates the applications of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) in heterogeneous downlink networks (HetNets). Due to the network densification, the small cell base station (SBS) interferes with the macrocell users (MUEs). In this paper, we utilise RIS to mitigate cross-tier interference in a HetNet via directional beamforming by adjusting the phase shift of the RIS. We consider RIS-assisted heterogeneous networks consisting of multiple SBS nodes and MUEs that utilise both direct paths and reflected paths. Therefore, the aim of this study is to maximise the sum rate of all MUEs by jointly optimising the transmit beamforming of the macrocell base station (MBS) and the phase shift of the RIS. An efficient RIS reflecting coefficient-based optimisation (RCO) is proposed based on a successive convex approximation approach. Simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme in terms of its sum rate in comparison with the scheme HetNet without RIS and the scheme HetNet with RIS but with random phase shifts.

Optimizing resource allocation for enhanced urban connectivity in LEO-UAV-RIS networks

A High-Efficiency and Versatile Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Design Paradigm with Novel Topological Representation

In this paper, we propose a novel computer vision-based approach to aid reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) for dynamic beam tracking and implement the corresponding prototype verification system. A camera is attached at the RIS to obtain the visual information about the surroundings, with which RIS identifies the incident beam direction and the desired reflected beam direction, and then adjusts the reflection coefficients according to the pre-designed codebooks. We build a 20-by-20 RIS running at 5.4 GHz and develop a high-speed control board to ensure the real-time refresh of the reflection coefficients. Meanwhile we implement an independent peer-to-peer communications system to simulate the physical link between the base station and the user equipment. The vision-aided RIS prototype system is tested in two mobile scenarios: RIS works in near-field conditions as a passive array antenna of the base station; RIS works in far-field conditions to assist the communication between the base station and the user equipment. The experimental results show that RIS can quickly adjust the reflection coefficients for dynamic beam tracking with the help of visual information.

In this paper, we propose a location-aware channel estimation based on the atomic norm minimization (ANM) for the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided millimeter-wave multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems. The beam training overhead at the base station (BS) is reduced by the direct beam steering towards the RIS with the location of the BS and the RIS. The RIS beamwidth adaptation is proposed to reduce the beam training overhead at the RIS, and also it enables accurate channel estimation by ensuring the user equipment receives all the multipath components from the RIS. After the beam training, the cascaded effective channel of the RIS-aided MIMO systems is estimated by ANM. Depending on whether the beam training overhead at the BS or at the RIS is reduced or not, the channel is represented as a linear combination of either 1D atoms, 2D atoms, or 3D atoms, and the ANM is applied to estimate the channel. Simulation results show that the proposed location-aware channel estimation via 2D ANM and 3D ANM achieves superior estimation accuracy to benchmarks.

Energy efficiency (EE) has become a key performance indicator in designing future wireless networks. In this regard, we propose a novel two reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) assisted coordinated multipoint (CoMP) network, where two RISs cooperate to reduce energy consumption by constructing an intelligent radio environment. Aiming to maximize this system’s energy efficiency (EE), the joint optimization problem on the cooperative beamforming among base stations (BSs) and passive beamforming among RISs, subject to each user’s data rate requirement, is formulated. An alternative optimization algorithm is proposed by decoupling it into a cooperative beamforming subproblem among BSs and a cooperative reflective coefficients design subproblem among RISs. Dinkelbach’s transform and complex fractional programming algorithms are also invoked to transform these two subproblems into convex optimization problems and obtain the optimal solution for each sub-problem. Numerical results validate the proposed algorithm’s feasibility, fast convergence, and flexibility. It also shows that the proposed scheme with cooperative beamforming design for both BSs and RISs outperforms that without RIS and that with randomly initialized RISs.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) have the ability to steer the electromagnetic (EM) waves to a desired direction. This enables the improvement of the wireless link performance by allowing the illumination of receivers otherwise shadowed by buildings or hills. In this paper, a standards-compliant link-level simulator is developed to study the performance improvement offered by a RIS in 5G New Radio (NR) uplink operating at sub-6 GHz bands. At these frequencies the direct channel between the user and base station is rarely completely blocked, but given the stringent power restrictions of devices, the RIS is utilized for enhancing the coverage performance in the uplink direction. In the studied cases, the transmitter (TX) is close to the RIS and a line-of-sight (LoS) path between the TX and RIS is assumed. The channel between the TX and receiver (RX) is modeled as a non-line-of-sight (NLoS) channel with 5G NR clustered delay line A (CDL-A) profile. Both LoS and NLoS channels between the RIS and RX are considered. Under state-of-the-art system settings, the RIS is shown to increase the symbol error rate link performance by 6 dB. When the performance is measured with coded bit error rate, the performance gain in simulated cases is 1 dB. The coverage enhancement is measured with the throughput as a function of the distance between the TX and RX. The distance at which the maximum possible throughput can be achieved is increased about 5%. The coverage can be further extended if a lower than the maximum throughput is accepted.