Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Assisted D2D Underlay Communications: A Two-Timescale Optimization Design

The performance of a device-to-device (D2D) underlay communication system is limited by the co-channel interference between cellular users (CUs) and D2D devices. To address this challenge, a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided D2D underlay system is studied in this paper. A two-timescale optimization scheme is proposed to reduce the required channel training and feedback overhead, where transmit beamforming at the base station (BS) and power control at the D2D transmitters are adapted to instantaneous effective channel state information (CSI); and the RIS phase shifts are adapted to slow-varying channel mean. Based on the two-timescale optimization scheme, we aim to maximize the D2D ergodic weighted sum-rate (WSR) subject to a given outage probability constrained signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) target for each CU. The two-timescale problem is decoupled into two sub-problems, and the two sub-problems are solved iteratively. Numerical results verified that the two-timescale based optimization performs better than two baselines, and also demonstrated a favourable trade-off between system performance and CSI overhead.