Energy-Efficient Cell-Free Network Assisted by Hybrid RISs

In this letter, we investigate a cell-free network aided by hybrid reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), which consists of a mixture of passive and active elements that are capable of amplifying and reflecting the incident signal. To maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of the system, we formulate a joint transmit beamforming and RIS coefficient optimization problem. To deal with the fractional objective function, Dinkelbach transform, Lagrangian dual reformulation, and quadratic transform are utilized, with a block coordinate descent (BCD) based algorithm proposed to decouple the variables. In addition, successive convex approximation (SCA) method is applied to iteratively to tackle the non-convexity of the sub-problems. Simulation results illustrate the effectiveness and convergence of the proposed algorithm through analyzing the EE and sum rate performance with varying parameter settings. The proposed hybrid RIS scheme can achieve 5% and 188% gain in EE compared with existing passive and active RISs. The fast convergence of the proposed algorithm is analyzed by numerical simulations as well.