Distributed Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Energy Efficient Indoor Terahertz Wireless Communications

TL;DR

This paper proposes a distributed reconfigurable intelligent surface framework to enhance energy efficiency and signal coverage in indoor terahertz wireless communications, addressing human blockage issues and supporting IoT applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed RISs framework for indoor THz communication, validated through extensive simulations and practical hardware considerations.

Findings

Distributed RISs significantly improve THz signal coverage.

The framework effectively mitigates human blockage in indoor environments.

Simulation results show increased SNR and QoS in various scenarios.

Abstract

With the fifth-generation (5G) networks widely commercialized and fast deployed, the sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication is envisioned to provide competitive quality of service (QoS) in multiple aspects to global users. The critical and underlying research of the 6G is, firstly, highly dependent on the precise modeling and characterization of the wireless propagation when the spectrum is believed to expand to the terahertz (THz) domain. Moreover, future networks' power consumption and energy efficiency are critical factors to consider. In this research, based on a review of the fundamental mechanisms of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted wireless communications, we utilize the 3D ray-tracing method to analyze a realistic indoor THz propagation environment with the existence of human blockers. Furthermore, we propose a distributed RISs framework (DRF) to assist the indoor THz wireless communication to achieve overall energy efficiency. The numerical analysis of simulation results based on more than 2,900 indoor THz wireless communication sub-scenarios has demonstrated the significant efficacy of applying distributed RISs to overcome the mobile human blockage issue, improve the THz signal coverage, increase signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), and QoS. With practical hardware design constraints investigated, we eventually envision how to utilize the existing integrated sensing and communication techniques to deploy and operate such a system in reality. Such a distributed RISs framework can also lay the foundation of efficient THz communications for Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks.