Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Deployment for Wideband Millimeter Wave Systems

The performance of wireless communication systems is fundamentally constrained by random and uncontrollable wireless channels. Recently, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) has emerged as a promising solution to enhance wireless network performance by smartly reconfiguring the radio propagation environment. While significant research has been conducted on RIS-assisted wireless systems, this paper focuses specifically on the deployment of RIS in a wideband millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) system to achieve maximum sum-rate. First, we derive the average user rate as well as the lower bound rate when the covariance of the channel follows the Wishart distribution. Based on the lower bound of users’ rate, we propose a heuristic method that transforms the problem of optimizing the RIS’s orientation into maximizing the number of users served by the RIS. Simulation results show that the proposed RIS deployment strategy can effectively improve the sum-rate. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed RIS deployment algorithm is only approximately 7.6% lower on average than that of the exhaustive search algorithm.