Reconfigurable-Intelligent-Surface-Assisted Indoor Millimeter-Wave Communications for Mobile Robots

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) and millimeter-wave (mmWave) communications have been considered for providing wireless connectivity to mobile robots used in industrial plants and other indoor environments. However, the existing works have not sufficiently studied how the number and deployment locations of RISs should be optimized for serving a mobile robot. In this article, we study RIS-assisted mmWave communications for a robot moving around fixed obstacles in an indoor industrial environment. For a fixed total number of reflecting elements, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the transmission energy consumption of the access point (AP) while ensuring the robot’s received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) above a threshold throughout its journey by jointly optimizing the number, positions, and phase shifts of RISs and the beamforming vectors of the AP. To solve the formulated nonconvex optimization problem, we devise an iterative algorithm that decomposes it into two subproblems (i.e., optimizing the phase shifts of RISs and the beamforming vector of the AP, and optimizing the number and locations of RISs) and solves them alternately. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm converges fast and can obtain the best number and locations of RISs that lead to a transmission energy consumption of the AP much lower than the benchmark schemes.