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 probability of false alarm and a common (among radar and RIS) power budget. An illustrative example is provided to assess the achievable detection performance, also in comparison with that of a radar operating alone or with the help of a passive RIS.
As a widely used localization and sensing technique, radars will play an important role in future wireless networks. However, the wireless channels between the radar and the targets are passively adopted by traditional radars, which limits the performance of target detection. To address this issue, we propose to use the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to improve the detection accuracy of radar systems due to its capability to customize channel conditions by adjusting its phase shifts, which is referred to as MetaRadar. In such a system, it is challenging to jointly optimize both radar…
This paper deals with the use of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) for radar surveillance in Non-Line Of Sight (N-LOS) scenarios. First of all, the geometry of the scene and the new system concept is described with emphasis on the required operative modes and the role played by the RIS. Then, the specific radar equation (including the RIS effect) is developed to manage the coverage requirements in the challenging region where the LOS is not present. Both noise and clutter interference cases (pulse length-limited and beamwidth-limited surface clutter as well as volume clutter) are cons…
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 …
In this work, we consider the target detection problem in a sensing architecture where the radar is aided by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), that can be modeled as an array of sub-wavelength small reflective elements capable of imposing a tunable phase shift to the impinging waves and, ultimately, of providing the radar with an additional echo of the target. A theoretical analysis is carried out for closely- and widely-spaced (with respect to the target) radar and RIS and for different beampattern configurations, and some examples are provided to show that large gains can be achiev…
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…
The intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) technology has recently attracted a lot of interest in wireless communications research. An IRS consists of passive reflective elements capable of tuning the phase, amplitude, frequency and polarization of the impinging waveforms. Given such desirable properties, the wireless channel characteristics can be controlled and optimized for specific signal design and processing needs -- thus promising significant potential in radar applications. In this paper, we establish the theoretical foundations for introducing IRS into a radar system and study the poten…
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…
