Optimal Placement of Active and Passive Elements in Hybrid RIS-assisted Communication Systems

TL;DR

This paper proposes a channel-aware method for optimally placing active and passive elements in hybrid RIS-assisted communication systems, significantly enhancing SNR performance through joint design and optimization.

Contribution

It introduces a novel joint optimization framework for element placement and precoding in hybrid RIS systems, with a low-complexity near-optimal solver.

Findings

Significant SNR improvement over passive RIS systems

Performance comparable to fully active RIS systems

Effective joint design of placement and precoding

Abstract

Hybrid reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (HRIS) are RIS architectures having both active and passive elements. The received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in HRIS-assisted communication systems depends on the placement of active elements. In this paper, we show that received SNR can be improved with a channel-aware placement of the active elements. We jointly design the transmit precoder, the RIS coefficients, and the location of active and passive elements of the HRIS to maximize the SNR. We solve the underlying combinatorial nonconvex optimization problem using alternating optimization and propose a low-complexity solver, which is provably nearly optimal. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate that the proposed method offers significantly improved performance compared to communication systems having a fully passive RIS array or a hybrid RIS array with channel agnostic active element placement and performance comparable to that of communication systems with a fully active RIS array.