This paper studies the physical layer security (PLS) of a vehicular network employing reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs). RIS technologies are emerging as an important paradigm for the realisation of next-generation smart radio environments, where large numbers of small, low-cost and passive elements, reflect the incident signal with an adjustable phase shift without requiring a dedicated energy source. Inspired by the promising potential of RIS-based transmission, we investigate the PLS of two vehicular network system models: One with vehicle-to-vehicle communication with the source employing a RIS-based access point, and the other is in the form of a vehicular adhoc network (VANET), with a RIS-based relay deployed on a building; both models assume the presence of an eavesdropper. The performance of the proposed systems are evaluated in terms of the average secrecy capacity (ASC) and the secrecy outage probability (SOP). We present accurate analytical expressions for the two performance metrics and study the impact of various system parameters on the overall performance of the two considered system configurations. Monte-Carlo simulations are provided throughout to validate the results. The results show that performance of the system in terms of the ASC and SOP is affected by the location of the RIS-relay as well as the number of RIS cells. Moreover, upto an order magnitude gain could be achieved within certain regions when the number of RIS cells are doubled, clearly indicating the benefit of employing a RIS configuration.
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) assist in paving the way for the evolution of conventional vehicular networks to autonomous driving. Having said that, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) faces numerous open challenges concerning the RIS-aided vehicle-to-everything (V2X) solutions of the near future. To tackle these challenges and to stimulate future research, this article focuses on the prospective transmission design of RIS-aided V2X communications. In particular, two V2X sidelink modes are enhanced by exploiting RISs and their variants, followed by a customized transmiss…
This paper studies the physical layer security (PLS) of a vehicular network employing a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). RIS technologies are emerging as an important paradigm for the realisation of smart radio environments, where large numbers of small, low-cost and passive elements, reflect the incident signal with an adjustable phase shift without requiring a dedicated energy source. Inspired by the promising potential of RIS-based transmission, we investigate two vehicular network system models: One with vehicle-to-vehicle communication with the source employing a RIS-based access…
Millimeter wave (MmWave) systems are vulnerable to blockages, which cause signal drop and link outage. One solution is to deploy reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) to add a strong non-line-of-sight path from the transmitter to receiver. To achieve the best performance, the location of the deployed RIS should be optimized for a given site, considering the distribution of potential users and possible blockers. In this paper, we find the optimal location, height and downtilt of RIS working in a realistic vehicular scenario. Because of the proximity between the RIS and the vehicles, and th…
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) is considered as a revolutionary technique to improve the wireless system performance by reconfiguring the radio wave propagation environment artificially. Motivated by the potential of RIS in vehicular networks, we analyze the secrecy outage performance of RIS-aided vehicular communications in this paper. More specifically, two vehicular communication scenarios are considered, i.e., a vehicular-to-vehicular (V2V) communication where the RIS acts as a relay and a vehicular-to-infrastructure (V2I) scenario where the RIS functions as the receiver. In bot…
Given its ability to control and manipulate wireless environments, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), also known as intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), has emerged as a key enabler technology for the six-generation (6G) cellular networks. In the meantime, vehicular environment radio propagation is negatively influenced by a large set of objects that cause transmission distortion such as high buildings. Therefore, this work is devoted to explore the area of RIS technology integration with vehicular communications while considering the dynamic nature of such communication environment. S…
Reconfigurable meta-surfaces are emerging as a novel and revolutionizing technology to enable intelligent wireless environments. Due to the low cost, improved efficiency, and passive nature of reflecting elements, it is becoming possible to program and control the wireless environment. Since wireless physical layer technologies can generally adapt to the wireless environment, their combination with reconfigurable surfaces and deep learning approaches can open new avenues for achieving secure 6G vehicular aided heterogeneous networks (HetNets). Motivated by these appealing advantages, this work…
Vehicular communication is an important application of the fifth generation of mobile communication systems (5G). Due to its low cost and energy efficiency, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been envisioned as a promising technique that can enhance the coverage performance significantly by passive beamforming. In this paper, we analyze the outage probability performance in IRS-assisted vehicular communication networks. We derive the expression of outage probability by utilizing series expansion and central limit theorem. Numerical results show that the IRS can significantly reduce the o…
We investigate the use of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in a millimeter-wave (mmWave) vehicular communication network. An intelligent reflecting surface consists of passive elements, which can reflect the incoming signals with adjustable phase shifts. By properly tuning the phase shifts we can improve link performance. This is known as phase optimization or passive beamforming. We consider the problem of rate maximization in the uplink, which utilizes an IRS. However, using an IRS brings more challenges in terms of channel estimation. We propose two schemes to reduce the channel esti…
Recent research provides an approximation on the performance for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted systems over generalized fading channels with phase noise resulting from imperfect phase compensation at the RIS. In this paper, we developed exact analysis and upper bounds on the performance of RIS-assisted vehicular communication system considering phase noise with mobility over asymmetric fading channels by coherently combining received signals reflected by RIS elements and direct transmissions from the source terminal. We employ a novel approach to represent the PDF and CDF o…
In this thesis, we introduce the fundamental equations behind the estimation of the link budget in a communications channel, highlighting the key limitations of conventional systems. Furthermore, we investigate the use of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces as a modern method of overcoming obstruction losses, while making use of numerical methods and computational electromagnetics to understand its physical mechanism and probe its theory of operation. Additionally, a preprint on computational geometry is presented, applicable to the field of computational electromagnetics, enabling the simulat…
With the recent introduction of electromagnetic meta-surfaces and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, a paradigm shift is currently taking place in the world of wireless communications and related industries. These new technologies have enabled the inclusion of the wireless channel as part of the optimization process. This is of great interest as we transition from 5G mobile communications towards 6G. In this paper, we explore the possibility of using a reconfigurable intelligent surface in order to disrupt the ability of an unintended receiver to geolocate the source of transmitted signals i…
This paper presents the analytic framework for evaluating the ergodic capacity (EC) of the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted systems. Moreover, high-signal-to-noise-ratio and high-number of reflection units (RUs) approximations for the EC are provided. Finally, the special case in which the RIS is equipped with a single RU is investigated. Our analysis is verified through respective Monte Carlo simulations, which highlight the accuracy of the proposed framework.
This paper presents an analytical pathloss model for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted terahertz (THz) wireless systems. Specifically, the model accommodates both the THz link and the RIS particularities. Finally, we derive a closed-form expression that returns the optimal phase shifting of each RIS reflection unit. The derived pathloss model is validated through extensive electromagnetic simulations and is expected to play a key role in the design of RIS-assisted THz wireless systems.
This paper presents a deep learning (DL) approach for estimating and detecting symbols in signals transmitted through reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS). The proposed network utilizes fully connected layers to estimate channels and phase angles from a reflected signal received through an RIS. Because the proposed network can estimate and detect symbols without any pilot signaling, this method reduces the overhead required for transmission. The improvements achieved by this method are quantified in terms of the bit-error rate, outperforming traditional detectors.
In this paper, a single user multiple input single output downlink wireless communication system is investigated, in which multiple reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are deployed to improve the propagation condition. Our objective is to optimize the phase shift matrices of all the RISs by exploiting the statistical channel state information (CSI). In particular, two model-free algorithms are proposed, which are applicable for any channel statistical assumptions. Numerical results show that the proposed algorithms significantly outperform the random phase shift scheme, especially when …
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has become a promising technology for enhancing the reliability of wireless communications, which is capable of reflecting the desired signals through appropriate phase shifts. However, the intended signals that impinge upon an RIS are often mixed with interfering signals, which are usually dynamic and unknown. In particular, the received signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) may be degraded by the signals reflected from the RISs that originate from non-intended users. To tackle this issue, we introduce the concept of intelligent spectrum learn…
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is one of the most promising technologies for 5G-Adv and 6G. It has the characteristics of low cost, low complexity, and easy deployment, which provides a new opportunity to develop intelligent high-speed railway communications. The typical applications of RIS-assisted smart high-speed railway communications are introduced in detail, including suppressing the Doppler shift effect, solving frequent handoff problems, overcoming high penetration loss problems, and supporting high-precision train positioning. The key technologies of RIS-assisted smart high-…
Recently there has been a flurry of research on the use of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) in wireless networks to create smart radio environments. In a smart radio environment, surfaces are capable of manipulating the propagation of incident electromagnetic waves in a programmable manner to actively alter the channel realization, which turns the wireless channel into a controllable system block that can be optimized to improve overall system performance. In this article, we provide a tutorial overview of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) for wireless communications. We descr…
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) based communications have emerged as a new paradigm. This letter proposes a differential reflecting modulation (DRM) scheme for RIS based communication systems. In DRM, information bits are jointly carried by the activation permutations of the reflecting patterns and the phases of the transmitted signals, leading to that DRM can work without any channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter, RIS or receiver. In other words, DRM can release the intricate and resource-consuming channel estimation in the transmission process. Simulation results show t…
In this paper, we focus on the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-enhanced two-way device-to-device (D2D) multi-pair orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) communication systems. Specifically, we maximize the minimum bidirectional weighted sum-rate by jointly optimizing the sub-band allocation, the power allocation and the discrete phase shift (PS) design at the RIS. To tackle the main difficulty of the non-convex PS design at the RIS, we firstly formulate a semi-definite relaxation problem and further devise a low-complexity solution for the PS design by leveraging the projec…
In this letter, we study the reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) aided full-duplex (FD) communication system. By jointly designing the active beamforming of two multi-antenna sources and passive beamforming of RIS, we aim to maximize the energy efficiency of the system, where extra self-interference cancellation power consumption in FD system is also considered. We divide the optimization problem into active and passive beamforming design subproblems, and adopt the alternative optimization framework to solve them iteratively. Dinkelbach's method is used to tackle the fractional objective…
Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has recently drawn significant attention in wireless communication technologies. However, identifying, modeling, and estimating the RIS channel in multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are considered challenging in recent studies. In this paper, a disassembled channel estimation framework for the RIS-MIMO system is proposed based on the eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) concept to separate the cascaded channel links and estimate each link separately. This estimation is based on modeling the RIS-MIMO channel as a keyhole MIMO system model. Numerical…
Optical reconfigurable intelligent surface (ORIS) is an emerging technology that can achieve reconfigurable optical propagation environments by precisely adjusting signal's reflection and shape through a large number of passive reflecting elements. In this paper, we investigate the performance of an ORIS-assisted dual-hop hybrid radio frequency (RF) and free space optics (FSO) communication system. By jointly considering the physical models of ORIS, RF channel, atmospheric turbulence, and pointing error, the closed-form solutions of the system's precise outage probability, asymptotic outage pr…
5G radio at millimeter wave (mmWave) and beyond 5G concepts at 0.1-1 THz can exploit angle and delay measurements for localization, by the virtue of increased bandwidth and large antenna arrays but are limited in terms of blockage caused by obstacles. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are seen as a transformative technology that can control the physical propagation environment in which they are embedded by passively reflecting EM waves in preferred directions. Whereas such RISs have been mainly intended for communication purposes, RISs can have great benefits in terms of performance, …
We investigate the benefits of integrating unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) elements to passively relay information sampled by Internet of Things devices (IoTDs) to the base station (BS). In order to maintain the freshness of relayed information, an optimization problem with the objective of minimizing the expected sum Age-of-Information (AoI) is formulated to optimize the altitude of the UAV, the communication schedule, and phases-shift of RIS elements. In the absence of prior knowledge of the activation pattern of the IoTDs, proximal policy optimi…
By reconfiguring the propagation environment of electromagnetic waves artificially, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have been regarded as a promising and revolutionary hardware technology to improve the energy and spectrum efficiency of wireless networks. In this paper, we study a RIS aided multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) wireless power transfer (WPT) system, where the transmitter is equipped with a constant-envelope analog beamformer. We formulate a novel problem to maximize the total received power of all the users by jointly optimizing the beamformer at transmitter …
This work demonstrates the effectiveness of a novel simultaneous transmission and reflection reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) in Full-Duplex (FD) aided communication system. The objective is to minimize the total transmit power by jointly designing the transmit power and the transmitting and reflecting (T&R) coefficients of the STAR-RIS. To solve the nonconvex problem, an efficient algorithm is proposed by utilizing the alternating optimization framework to iteratively optimize variables. Specifically, in each iteration, we drive the closed-form expression for the optimal power de…
We consider an uplink multi-user scenario and investigate the use of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) to optimize spatial multiplexing performance when a linear receiver is used. We study two different formulations of the problem, namely maximizing the effective rank and maximizing the minimum singular value of the RIS-augmented channel. We employ gradient-based optimization to solve the two problems and compare the solutions in terms of the sum-rate achievable when a linear receiver is used. Our results show that the proposed criteria can be used to optimize the RIS to obtain effecti…
In the recent years, the proliferation of wireless data traffic has led the scientific community to explore the use of higher unallocated frequency bands, such as the millimeter wave and terahertz (0.1-10 THz) bands. However, they are prone to blockages from obstacles laid in the transceiver path. To address this, in this work, the use of a reconfigurable-intelligent-surface (RIS) to restore the link between a transmitter (TX) and a receiver (RX), operating in the D-band (110-170 GHz) is investigated. The system performance is evaluated in terms of pathgain and capacity considering the RIS des…
The received signal strength (RSS) based technique is widely utilized for ubiquitous positioning due to its advantage of simple implementability. However, its accuracy is limited because the RSS values of adjacent locations can be very difficult to distinguish. Against this background, we propose the novel RSS-based positioning scheme enabled by reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). By modifying the reflection coefficient of the RIS, the propagation channels are programmed in such a way that the differences between the RSS values of adjacent locations can be enlarged to improve the positio…
The reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is one of the promising technology contributing to the next generation smart radio environment. The application scenarios include massive connectivity support, signal enhancement, and security protection. One crucial difficulty of analyzing the RIS-assisted networks is that the channel performance is sensitive to the change of user receiving direction. This paper tackles the problem by categorizing the RIS illuminated space into four categories: perfect alignment, coherent alignment, random alignment, and destructive alignment. These four categories…
In this paper, the programmable signal propagation paradigm, enabled by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs), is exploited for high accuracy $3$-Dimensional (3D) user localization with a single multi-antenna base station. Capitalizing on the tunable reflection capability of passive RISs, we present a two-stage user localization method leveraging the multi-reflection wireless environment. In the first stage, we deploy an off-grid compressive sensing approach, which is based on the atomic norm minimization, for estimating the angles of arrival associated with each RIS, which is followed, i…
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 RIS's applications? 4) What are the relevant challenges and future resea…
In the obstructed tunnels, the signal transmission will suffer the risk of ray-path blocking caused by the obstacles owing to the Snell's law. In this letter, the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) that can reflect the electromagnetic waves to any specific directions is introduced to mitigate the signal blocking. The closed-form expressions for blocking probability (BP) for one reflection with single RIS and multiple RISs under various scenarios are derived. Compared with the case without RIS, significant reduction of BP can be found with proper configuration of the RIS. Moreover, the im…
This paper investigates an active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided mobile edge computing (MEC) system. Compared with passive RIS, the active RIS is equipped with active reflective amplifier, which can effectively circumvent the "double path loss" attenuation. We propose a joint computing and communication design to minimize the maximum computational latency (MCL), subject to both the phase shift constraints and the edge computing capability constraints. Specifically, the original problem is decoupled into four subproblems, and then the block coordinate descent (BCD) method and th…
The direction of arrival (DOA) estimation problem is addressed in this letter. A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided system for the DOA estimation is proposed. Unlike traditional DOA estimation systems, a low-cost system with only one complete functional receiver is given by changing the phases of the reflected signals at the RIS elements to realize the multiple measurements. Moreover, an atomic norm-based method is proposed for the DOA estimation by exploiting the target sparsity in the spatial domain and solved by a semi-definite programming (SDP) method. Furthermore, the RIS elem…
Active reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are a novel and promising technology that allows controlling the radio propagation environment while compensating for the product path loss along the RIS-assisted path. In this letter, we consider the classical radar detection problem and propose to use an active RIS to get a second independent look at a prospective target illuminated by the radar transmitter. At the design stage, we select the power emitted by the radar, the number of RIS elements, and their amplification factor in order to maximize the detection probability for a fixed probab…
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) are an emerging technology that can be used to reconfigure the propagation environment to improve cellular communication link rates. RIS, which are thin metasurfaces composed of discrete elements, passively manipulate incident electromagnetic waves through controlled reflective phase tuning. In this paper, we investigate co-design of the multiantenna basestation beamforming vector and multielement RIS phase shifts. The downlink narrowband transmission uses sub-6 GHz frequency bands, and the user equipment has a single antenna. Subject to the non-convex…
Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is emerging as a key enabler to address the growing spectrum congestion problem and satisfy increasing demands for ubiquitous sensing and communication. By sharing various resources and information, ISAC achieves much higher spectral, energy, hardware, and economic efficiencies. Concurrently, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology has been deemed as a promising approach due to its capability of intelligently manipulating the wireless propagation environment in an energy and hardware efficient manner. In this article, we analyze the poten…
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) is a promising solution to build a programmable wireless environment via steering the incident signal in fully customizable ways with reconfigurable passive elements. In this paper, we consider a RIS-aided multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) downlink communication system. Our objective is to maximize the weighted sum-rate (WSR) of all users by joint designing the beamforming at the access point (AP) and the phase vector of the RIS elements, while both the perfect channel state information (CSI) setup and the imperfect CSI setup are investigat…
