Power Saving Design of Active Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface―A Sub-Array Architecture

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is envisioned as a promising technology to enhance future wireless communication systems. Very recently, a novel active RIS architecture has been proposed via introducing amplifiers into the reflecting elements. Although these embedded amplifiers can effectively extend the RIS coverage, they also bring non-negligible energy expenditure. To overcome this drawback, this paper proposes a novel sub-array based structure, which divides the entire RIS array into multiple sub-arrays with each being flexibly turned on/off. We aim to minimize the power consumption of the whole system via jointly activating sub-arrays and designing beamforming, which is highly challenging due to its combinatorial nature. Via inducing the group sparsity and leveraging the majorization-minimization (MM) approach, we develop an efficient solution to resolve this challenge. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed sub-array structure can significantly reduce the power consumption compared to the conventional “all-on” scheme.