Smart Wireless Environments Enabled by RISs: Deployment Scenarios and Two Key Challenges

TL;DR

This paper explores deployment scenarios for RIS-enabled smart wireless environments, highlighting key challenges like influence area and bandwidth, supported by simulations and measurements, to guide future deployment strategies.

Contribution

It categorizes RIS deployment scenarios based on performance goals and discusses architectural requirements, introducing two novel challenges with preliminary results.

Findings

Identification of deployment strategies for different performance objectives

Preliminary simulation results on RIS influence area and bandwidth

Reflectarray measurements supporting the challenges discussed

Abstract

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) constitute the enabler for programmable propagation of electromagnetic signals, and are lately being considered as a candidate physical-layer technology for the demanding connectivity, reliability, localization, and sustainability requirements of next generation wireless communications networks. In this paper, we present various deployment scenarios for RIS-enabled smart wireless environments that have been recently designed by the ongoing EU H2020 RISE-6G project. The scenarios are taxonomized according to performance objectives, in particular, connectivity and reliability, localization and sensing, as well as sustainability and secrecy. We identify various deployment strategies and sketch the core architectural requirements in terms of RIS control and signaling, depending on the RIS hardware architectures and their respective capabilities. Furthermore, we introduce and discuss, via preliminary simulation results and reflectarray measurements, two key novel challenges with RIS-enabled smart wireless environments, namely, the area of influence and the bandwidth of influence of RISs, which corroborate the need for careful deployment and planning of this new technology.