Empowering the Vehicular Network with RIS Technology: A State-of-the-Art Review

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) are expected to bring about a revolutionary transformation in vehicular networks, thus paving the way for a future characterized by connected and automated vehicles (CAV). An RIS is a planar structure comprising many passive elements that can dynamically manipulate electromagnetic waves to enhance wireless communication by reflecting, refracting, and focusing signals in a programmable manner. RIS exhibits substantial potential for improving vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication through various means, including coverage enhancement, interference mitigation, improving signal strength, and providing additional layers of privacy and security. This article presents a comprehensive survey that explores the emerging opportunities arising from the integration of RIS into vehicular networks. To examine the convergence of RIS and V2X communications, the survey adopted a holistic approach, thus highlighting the potential benefits and challenges of this combination. In this study, we examined several applications of RIS-aided V2X communication. Subsequently, we delve into the fundamental emerging technologies that are expected to empower vehicular networks, encompassing mobile edge computing (MEC), non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), millimeter-wave communication (mmWave), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and visible light communication (VLC). Finally, to stimulate further research in this domain, we emphasize noteworthy research challenges and potential avenues for future exploration.

Joint Beamforming and Phase Shifts Design for RIS-Aided Multi-User Full-Duplex Systems in Smart Cities

Full-duplex (FD) and reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) are potential technologies for achieving wireless communication effectively. Therefore, in theory, the RIS-aided FD system is supposed to enhance spectral efficiency significantly for the ubiquitous Internet of Things devices in smart cities. However, this technology additionally induces the loop-interference (LI) of RIS on the residual self-interference (SI) of the FD base station, especially in complicated urban outdoor environments, which will somewhat counterbalance the performance benefit. Inspired by this, we first establish an objective and constraints considering the residual SI and LI in two typical urban outdoor scenarios. Then, we decompose the original problem into two subproblems according to the variable types and jointly design the beamforming matrices and phase shifts vector methods. Specifically, we propose a successive convex approximation algorithm and a soft actor-critic deep reinforcement learning-related scheme to solve the subproblems alternately. To prove the effectiveness of our proposal, we introduce benchmarks of RIS phase shifts design for comparison. The simulation results show that the performance of the low-complexity proposed algorithm is only slightly lower than the exhaustive search method and outperforms the fixed-point iteration scheme. Moreover, the proposal in scenario two is more outstanding, demonstrating the application predominance in urban outdoor environments.

A Survey on the Impact of Intelligent Surfaces in the Terahertz Communication Channel Models

Terahertz (THz) band will play an important role in enabling sixth generation (6G) envisioned applications. Compared with lower frequency signals, THz waves are severely attenuated by the atmosphere temperature, pressure, and humidity. Thus, designing a THz communication system must take into account how to circumvent or diminish those issues to achieve a sufficient quality of service. Different solutions are being analyzed: intelligent communication environments, ubiquitous artificial intelligence, extensive network automation, and dynamic spectrum access, among others. This survey focuses on the benefits of integrating intelligent surfaces (ISs) and THz communication systems by providing an overview of IS in wireless communications with the scanning of the recent developments, a description of the architecture, and an explanation of the operation. The survey also covers THz channel models, differentiating them based on deterministic and statistical channel modeling. The IS-aided THz channels are elucidated at the end of the survey. Finally, discussions and research directions are given to help enrich the IS field of research and guide the reader through open issues.

A Communication Anti-Jamming Scheme Assisted by RIS with Angular Response

By optimizing the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) reflection coefficients, the channel capacity of legitimate users can be increased, thereby enhancing the anti-jamming performance of communication systems. However, existing studies on RIS-assisted anti-jamming assume that there is no coupling between the RIS reflection coefficients and the incident angle of electromagnetic (EM) waves, which is quite unreasonable. Therefore, we consider the effect of the incident angle of EM waves on the reflection coefficients of the RIS and propose a communication anti-jamming scheme assisted by an RIS with angular response. Specifically, a problem is formulated to optimize the RIS reflection coefficients so that the legitimate signal is amplified, but the jamming signal is attenuated, thus enhancing the legitimate channel capacity. However, the coupling of the EM incident angle and the RIS reflection coefficients causes the problem to be non-convex. To tackle this problem, we equivalently transform the RIS reflection coefficients optimization problem into a quadratically constrained quadratic programming (QCQP) problem using the complex Taylor expansion and the multidimensional complex quadratic transform (MCQT) and solve it utilizing the alternating direction method of the multipliers (ADMM) algorithm. The simulation results reveal that, compared to other schemes supported by RIS without angular response, the proposed scheme is able to achieve a significant improvement in the anti-jamming performance.

Channel Estimation for RIS-Assisted MIMO Systems in Millimeter Wave Communications

The large number of estimated parameters in a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) makes it difficult to achieve accurate channel estimation accuracy in 6G. Therefore, we suggest a novel two-phase channel estimation framework for uplink multiuser communication. In this context, we propose an orthogonal matching pursuit (OMP)-based linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) channel estimation approach. The OMP algorithm is used in the proposed algorithm to update the support set and pick the columns of the sensing matrix that are most correlated with the residual signal, which successfully reduces pilot overhead by removing redundancy. Here, we use LMMSE's advantages for handling noise to address the problem of inadequate channel estimation accuracy when the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is low. Simulation findings demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms least-squares (LS), traditional OMP, and other OMP-based algorithms in terms of estimate accuracy.

Group-Connected Impedance Network of RIS-Assisted Rate-Splitting Multiple Access in MU-MIMO Wireless Communication Systems

The reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA) are considered as promising technologies for the beyond Fifth-Generation (B5G) and Sixth-Generation (6G) wireless systems by controlling the propagation environment, which attenuates the transmitted signal, and by managing the interference by splitting the user message into common and private messages. Because conventional RIS elements have each impedance connected to the ground, the sum-rate performance improvement of the RIS is limited. Therefore, the new RISs, which have impedance elements connected to each other, have been proposed recently. To be more adaptive to each channel, the optimization of the grouping of the RIS elements is required. Furthermore, since the solution of the optimal rate-splitting (RS) power-splitting ratio is complex, the value should be simply optimized to be more practical in the wireless system. In this paper, the grouping scheme of the RIS elements according to the user scheduling and the solution of the RS power-splitting ratio based on fractional programming (FP) are proposed. The simulation results showed that the proposed RIS-assisted RSMA system achieved a high sum-rate performance compared to the conventional RIS-assisted spatial-division multiple access (SDMA) system. Therefore, the proposed scheme can perform adaptively for the channel and has a flexible interference management. Furthermore, it can be a more suitable technique for B5G and 6G.

Passive Type Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface: Measurement of Radiation Patterns

The demand for unprecedented data and ubiquitous wireless connections have led to the adoption of new types of transmitters and receivers. Additionally, different new types of devices and technologies need to be proposed for such demand. Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is going to play a very significant role in the upcoming beyond-5G/6G communications. It is envisioned that not only the RIS will be deployed to assist and create a smart wireless environment for the upcoming communications, but also the receiver and transmitter can be fabricated using RIS to make a smart and intelligent transmitter and receiver. Thus, the latency of upcoming communications can be reduced very significantly using RIS, which is a very important factor. Artificial intelligence assists communications and shall be adopted widely for the next generation networks. In this paper, radiation pattern measurement results of our previously published RIS have been provided. This work is the extension work of our previously proposed RIS. The polarization-independent passive type of RIS working in the sub-6 GHz frequency band using low-cost FR4-substrate was designed. Each unit cell with dimensions of 42 mm × 42 mm had a single-layer substrate backed by a copper plate. A 10 × 10-unit cell array was fabricated to check the performance of the RIS. Such types of unit cells and RIS were designed to set up initial measurement facilities in our laboratory for any kinds of RIS measurements.

Temporal Neural Network Framework Adaptation in Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Assisted Wireless Communication

A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) has potential for enhancing the performance of wireless communication. A RIS includes cheap passive elements, and the reflecting of signals can be controlled to a specific location of users. In addition, machine learning (ML) techniques are efficient in solving complex problems without explicit programming. Data-driven approaches are efficient in predicting the nature of any problem and can provide a desirable solution. In this paper, we propose a temporal convolutional network (TCN)-based model for RIS-based wireless communication. The proposed model consists of four TCN layers, one fully connected layer, one ReLU layer, and lastly a classification layer. In the input, we provide data in the form of complex numbers to map a specified label under QPSK and BPSK modulation. We consider 2×2 and 4×4 MIMO communication using one base station and two single-antenna users. We have considered three types of optimizers to evaluate the TCN model. For benchmarking, long short-term memory (LSTM) and without ML are compared. The simulation results are conducted in terms of the bit error rate and symbol error rate which show the effectiveness of the proposed TCN model.

Low-Complexity Beamforming Design for a Cooperative Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided Cell-Free Network

Cell-free (CF) networks are proposed to suppress the interference among collocated cells by deploying several BSs without cell boundaries. Nevertheless, as installing several base stations (BSs) may require high power consumption, cooperative CF networks integrated with a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)/metasurface can avoid this problem. In such cooperative RIS-aided MIMO networks, efficient beamforming schemes are essential to boost their spectral and energy efficiency. However, most of the existing available beamforming schemes to maximize spectral and energy efficiency are complex and entail high complexity due to the matrix inversions. To this end, in this work we present a computationally efficient stochastic optimization-based particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to amplify the spectral efficiency of the cooperative RIS-aided CF MIMO system. In the proposed PSO algorithm, several swarms are generated, while the direction of each swarm is tuned in each iteration based on the sum-rate performance to obtain the best solution. Our simulation results show that our proposed scheme can approximate the performance of the existing solutions for both the performance metrics, i.e., spectral and energy efficiency, at a very low complexity.

Parameters and Measurement Techniques of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

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.

Accelerated PARAFAC-Based Channel Estimation for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Assisted MISO Systems

To achieve fast and accurate channel estimation of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems, we propose an accelerated bilinear alternating least squares algorithm (ABALS) based on parallel factor decomposition. Firstly, we build a tensor model of the received signal, and expand it to obtain the unfolded forms of the model. Secondly, we derive the expression of the estimation problem of two channels based on the unfolded forms to transform the problem into a cost function problem. Furthermore, we solve the cost function problem by introducing a simpler iterative optimization constraint and linear interpolation. Finally, we provide a strategy on the receiver design based on the feasibility conditions discussed in this paper, which can guarantee the uniqueness of the channel estimation problem. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can obtain a faster estimation speed and less iteration steps than the alternating least squares (ALS) algorithm, and the accuracy of the two algorithms is very close.

RIS-Assisted Multi-Antenna AmBC Signal Detection Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Signal detection is one of the most critical and challenging issues in ambient backscatter communication (AmBC) systems. In this paper, a multi-antenna AmBC signal detection method is proposed based on reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and deep reinforcement learning. Firstly, an efficient multi-antenna AmBC system is developed based on RIS, which can achieve information transmission and energy collection simultaneously. Secondly, a smart twin delayed deep deterministic (TD3) AmBC signal detection method is presented, based on deep reinforcement learning. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments are performed, which show that the proposed method is more compelling than the outstanding comparison methods.

Two-Stage Channel Estimation for Semi-Passive RIS-Assisted Millimeter Wave Systems

In a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted millimeter Wave (mmWave) communication system, the channel coefficient increases exponentially with the number of RIS elements which results in expensive pilot overhead. Most previous works have proposed some channel estimation algorithms for the estimation accuracy of cascaded channels, which have improved the estimation accuracy, but the pilot overhead is discouraging in the estimation process. To improve the channel estimation accuracy with reduced pilot overhead, we propose a two-stage channel estimation protocol by exploiting semi-passive elements and the coherent time difference of the channel, where the quasi-static channel between the base stations (BS) and RIS is estimated at the RIS, and the user (UE)-RIS time-varying channel is estimated at the BS. In the first stage, we formulate the BS-RIS channel estimation as a mathematical optimization problem by an iterative weighting method and then propose a gradient descent (GD)-based algorithm to solve it. In the second stage, we first transform the received the UE-RIS signal model into an equivalent parallel factor (PARAFAC) tensor model and estimate the UE-RIS channel by the least-squares (LS) algorithm. The simulation results show that the proposed method has better estimation accuracy than the LS, compression sensing (CS) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) methods with less pilot overhead, and the spectral efficiency is improved by at least 10.5% compared to the other three methods.

Two-Stage Multiarmed Bandit for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Aided Millimeter Wave Communications

A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a promising technology that can extend short-range millimeter wave (mmWave) communications coverage. However, phase shifts (PSs) of both mmWave transmitter (TX) and RIS antenna elements need to be optimally adjusted to effectively cover a mmWave user. This paper proposes codebook-based phase shifters for mmWave TX and RIS to overcome the difficulty of estimating their mmWave channel state information (CSI). Moreover, to adjust the PSs of both, an online learning approach in the form of a multiarmed bandit (MAB) game is suggested, where a nested two-stage stochastic MAB strategy is proposed. In the proposed strategy, the PS vector of the mmWave TX is adjusted in the first MAB stage. Based on it, the PS vector of the RIS is calibrated in the second stage and vice versa over the time horizon. Hence, we leverage and implement two standard MAB algorithms, namely Thompson sampling (TS) and upper confidence bound (UCB). Simulation results confirm the superior performance of the proposed nested two-stage MAB strategy; in particular, the nested two-stage TS nearly matches the optimal performance.

Physical-Layer Security Improvement with Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for 6G Wireless Communication Systems

Recently, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have received much interest from both academia and industry due to their flexibility and cost-effectiveness in adjusting the phase and amplitude of wireless signals with low-cost passive reflecting elements. In particular, many RIS-aided techniques have been proposed to improve both data rate and energy efficiency for 6G wireless communication systems. In this paper, we propose a novel RIS-based channel randomization (RCR) technique for improving physical-layer security (PLS) for a time-division duplex (TDD) downlink cellular wire-tap network which consists of a single base station (BS) with multiple antennas, multiple legitimate pieces of user equipment (UE), multiple eavesdroppers (EVEs), and multiple RISs. We assume that only a line-of-sight (LOS) channel exists among the BS, the RISs, and the UE due to propagation characteristics of tera-hertz (THz) spectrum bands that may be used in 6G wireless communication systems. In the proposed technique, each RIS first pseudo-randomly generates multiple reflection matrices and utilizes them for both pilot signal duration (PSD) in uplink and data transmission duration (DTD) in downlink. Then, the BS estimates wireless channels of UE with reflection matrices of all RISs and selects the UE that has the best secrecy rate for each reflection matrix generated. It is shown herein that the proposed technique outperforms the conventional techniques in terms of achievable secrecy rates.