Active RIS Versus Passive RIS: Which Is Superior with the Same Power Budget?

TL;DR

This paper theoretically compares active and passive RIS systems under equal power budgets, showing active RIS's superiority under certain conditions, with optimal power allocation analysis and system parameter impact.

Contribution

It provides a fair comparison framework for active and passive RIS, deriving optimal power allocation and analyzing conditions for active RIS's advantage.

Findings

Active RIS outperforms passive RIS when power budget is moderate.

Optimal power allocation between BS and RIS is derived.

Performance depends on system parameters like number of RIS elements.

Abstract

This letter theoretically compares the active reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided system with the passive RIS-aided system. For fair comparison, we consider that these two systems have the same overall power budget that can be used at both the base station (BS) and the RIS. For active RIS, we first derive the optimal power allocation between the BS's transmit signal power and RIS's output signal power. We also analyze the impact of various system parameters on the optimal power allocation ratio. Then, we compare the performance between the active RIS and the passive RIS, which demonstrates that the active RIS would be superior if the power budget is not very small and the number of RIS elements is not very large.