RIS-Assisted Environment Aware Positioning in 6G Wireless Networks

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) can form smart radio environments for high-precision positioning of mobile users in sixth-generation (6G) cellular networks. Accordingly, in this work we present a RIS-assisted positioning approach that takes into account the incident planar wavefront on the RIS to achieve accurate positioning of a user in the network and its surroundings. We derive the mean square positioning error (MSPE) to assess the precision of the RIS-assisted positioning system in terms of the mean squared errors. Next, we provide solutions for optimal RIS placement and configuration within the deployed network. A comprehensive numerical analysis is presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed framework for various positioning scenarios with respect to the location of the RIS, the number of elements, and the bandwidth of the communication system. The numerical results suggest that RISs can be used to particularly enhance the positioning performance of next-generation 6G wireless networks.