Interference Suppression for Railway Wireless Communication Systems: A Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Approach

Due to transmission of train control and dispatch commands, the ultra high reliability is required for railway wireless communication systems (RWCS). However, the quality of service (QoS) of RWCS is affected by external interference and jamming seriously in railway transportation. The external interference and jamming generated from intentional and/or unintentional sources can disturb the transmission of RWCS and be extremely dangerous for the trains’ safety. In this paper, a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) approach is proposed to suppress the interference and jamming in RWCS. By taking the signal-to-interference-plus-noise (SINR) as the QoS metrics, the interference suppression problem with RIS is transformed into a maximizing receiving SINR problem. Two optimum solutions, which one is based on Charnes-Cooper transformation and the other is based on single linear programming, are provided. In order to deploy the RIS in RWCS practically, two low-complexity sub-optimum solutions, which one is to bypass the channel estimation for interference links and the other is to maximize the receiving desired power, are also discussed. The simulations results show that the RIS can be employed in RWCS with considerable anti-interference gain.