An Open Platform for Simulating the Physical Layer of 6G Communication Systems with Multiple Intelligent Surfaces

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open simulation platform for modeling the physical-layer electromagnetic interactions of multiple Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces in 6G wireless systems, enabling realistic analysis of multi-RIS deployments.

Contribution

It provides the first open, detailed electromagnetic simulation platform for multi-RIS systems, facilitating research and development in 6G wireless communication.

Findings

Developed a basic RIS unit cell model

Simulated multi-RIS electromagnetic coupling

Platform code is publicly available

Abstract

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) constitute a promising technology that could fulfill the extreme performance and capacity needs of the upcoming 6G wireless networks, by offering software-defined control over wireless propagation phenomena. Despite the existence of many theoretical models describing various aspects of RIS from the signal processing perspective (e.g., channel fading models), there is no open platform to simulate and study their actual physical-layer behavior, especially in the multi-RIS case. In this paper, we develop an open simulation platform, aimed at modeling the physical-layer electromagnetic coupling and propagation between RIS pairs. We present the platform by initially designing a basic unit cell, and then proceeding to progressively model and simulate multiple and larger RISs. The platform can be used for producing verifiable stochastic models for wireless communication in multi-RIS deployments, such as vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications in autonomous vehicles and cybersecurity schemes, while its code is freely available to the public.