On Energy Efficiency of Wideband RIS-Aided Cell-Free Network

Cell-free (CF) network is a favorable technique against inter-cell interferences to improve the network capacity. However, to further improve the network capacity, a large number of base stations (BSs) are required to be deployed with high cost and power consumption. To tackle this problem, an energy-efficient technique called reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided CF network has been recently proposed. By replacing some of the required power-hungry BSs with low-power RISs, the energy efficiency of CF network can be enhanced with guaranteed performance. To achieve this goal, in this paper, we first formulate a joint active and passive beamforming problem to maximize the energy efficiency of RIS-aided CF networks. Then, we propose an alternate optimization algorithm to solve this problem. Specifically, we decompose the original energy efficiency maximization problem into multiple subproblems and solve them alternatively. Particularly, we adopt the zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming scheme to optimize the active beamforming at BSs, while the sequential programming (SP) method is adopted to realize the passive beamforming at RISs. Moreover, a realistic energy-consumption model for wideband RIS-aided CF networks is provided, and the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is evaluated by simulations. Finally, simulation results verify that, the proposed scheme is able to achieve a higher energy efficiency than the existing benchmark solution.