AI-Enabled Unmanned Vehicle-Assisted Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Deployment, Prototyping, Experiments, and Opportunities

TL;DR

This paper presents an AI-driven prototype for deploying reconfigurable intelligent surfaces on autonomous vehicles, demonstrating high throughput and rapid deployment in 6G wireless networks through experiments and reinforcement learning.

Contribution

It introduces a novel AI-enabled RIS deployment system using autonomous vehicles and federated reinforcement learning, with experimental validation showing superior throughput and deployment speed.

Findings

Achieved up to 980 Mbps throughput with 100 MHz bandwidth

Demonstrated rapid deployment and low complexity of the system

Outperformed existing RIS deployment methods in experiments

Abstract

The requirement of wireless data demands is increasingly high as the sixth-generation (6G) technology evolves. Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is promisingly deemed to be one of 6G techniques for extending service coverage, reducing power consumption, and enhancing spectral efficiency. In this article, we have provided some fundamentals of RIS deployment in theory and hardware perspectives as well as utilization of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. We conducted an intelligent deployment of RIS (i-Dris) prototype, including dual-band auto-guided vehicle (AGV) assisted RISs associated with an mmWave base station (BS) and a receiver. The RISs are deployed on the AGV with configured incident/reflection angles. While, both the mmWave BS and receiver are associated with an edge server monitoring downlink packets for obtaining system throughput. We have designed a federated multi-agent reinforcement learning scheme associated with several AGV-RIS agents and sub-agents per AGV-RIS consisting of the deployment of position, height, orientation and elevation angles. The experimental results presented the stationary measurement in different aspects and scenarios. The i-Dris can reach up to 980 Mbps transmission throughput under a bandwidth of 100 MHz with comparably low complexity as well as rapid deployment, which outperforms the other existing works. At last, we highlight some opportunities and future issues in leveraging RIS-empowered wireless communication networks.