RIS-aided Wireless Communication with Movable Elements Geometry Impact on Performance

TL;DR

This paper evaluates how movable antennas integrated with reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) influence wireless communication performance, showing significant improvements in outage probability and SNR over fixed-position RIS configurations.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analysis of movable antenna RIS structures, demonstrating their performance benefits and the impact of geometry changes on system effectiveness.

Findings

24% outage probability improvement

2 dB SNR gain

Performance advantage over fixed RIS

Abstract

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) are known as a promising technology to improve the performance of wireless communication networks, and have been extensively studied. Movable Antennas (MA) are a novel technology that fully exploits the antenna placement for enhancing the system performance. This article aims at evaluating the impact of transmit power and number of antenna elements on the outage probability performance of an MA-enabled RIS structure (MA-RIS), compared to existing Fixed-Position Antenna RIS (FPA-RIS). The change in geometry caused by the movement of antennas and its implications for the effective number of illuminated elements, are studied for 1D and 2D array structures. Our numerical results confirm the performance advantage provided by MA-RIS, achieving 24\% improvement in outage probability, and 2 dB gain in Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR), as compared to FPA-RIS.