Transparent RIS: Wireless Coverage Enhancement via Region-Oriented Passive Beamforming

We investigate a new deployment form of reflective intelligent surface (RIS), which aims at enhancing the quality of service of a main communication system in a target region, while without the need of changing its transmission protocol and scheme (i.e., the RIS is “transparent” to the main system). To this end, we mathematically formulate a coverage enhancement problem, where a RIS is used transparently in the sense that the BS can be unaware of its existence, while the minimum channel link strength, measured from every BS antenna to any point in the target region, can be maximized. The formulated problem is non-convex with mixed discrete-continuous variables. To tackle this challenge, we recast it into a convex feasibility problem via spatial sampling and semi-definite relaxation. Based on a derived analytical upper bound on the link strength difference between any two location points, we further characterize the coverage-similarity region of a given location, and accordingly propose an improved spatial sampling scheme for efficient implementation. Simulation results show that the proposed transparent RIS design achieves better coverage performance than benchmark schemes. More importantly, it can effectively improve the communication performance without affecting the transmission scheme originally adopted by the main communication system.