A study on multi-RIS for multi-user distributed MIMO systems

This paper presents a preliminary analysis on the impact of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) for the realization of multi-user Distributed multiple input multiple output (DMIMO) systems, where the distributed units are actually RISs. Assuming no direct link between the multi-antenna Access Point (AP) and the users, we design the joint transmit beamforming from the AP to the set of RISs associated to each user, performed via RIS phase shift shaping. In order to comply with the semi-passive nature of RISs, the phase shifts are computed via a Genetic Algorithm (GA), where the optimization is based on the Signal-to-Leakage-and-Noise-Ratio (SLNR) precoding scheme. Numerical results confirm that this GA implementation significantly outperforms the common Maximum Ratio Beamforming (MRB) approach in terms of interference suppression and sum-rate, but at the price of a significant increase in computational complexity. Our solution justify the interest of a multi-RIS system for spatial multiplexing, and opens to several further research directions.