The Impact of the Circuit Non-Idealities on the System-Level Communication Metrics in Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) represents a crucial technology for the advancement of wireless communications, particularly in the context of 5G and beyond. To the best of our knowledge, there is no work in literature which investigates a possible link between circuit parameters, which are necessary for the representation of the unit cell and its reconfigurability circuit, and the system parameters, in order to evaluate the performance of a RIS-assisted communication. This work aims to address this gap by establishing a link between the two types of parameters. Another fundamental contribution concerns the study of the effects of quantization of the phase values associated with the unit cell on communication performance. In this paper, the scenarios with continuous and quantized phase values were considered, as well as effects of the quantization, taking into account the impact of circuit components within RIS-unit cells.