Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Performance Assessment Through a System-Level Simulator

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are considered a promising technology for boosting the coverage and for enhancing the spectral efficiency of wireless systems, as well as for taming the wireless environment. The potential benefits of RISs are currently being analyzed and various approaches are being proposed to address the challenges for their integration in wireless networks. Currently available studies to quantify the potential gains of deploying RISs in wireless networks are limited to simple network topologies, while no system-level assessments have been reported to date. Network-level, for example, on the scale of hundreds of square meters, simulations are, however, the first step to quantify the actual value of emerging technologies and the steppingstone before considering large scale system-level experimental evaluations and network deployments. Toward this direction, this article reports the first system-level simulation results and analysis of an RIS deployment in a typical urban city that is served by a fifth-generation cellular network. The obtained system-level simulation results unveil that the benefits of RISs vary depending on the operating frequency and the size of the surfaces. Specifically, we investigate the performance improvement that RISs can provide, in terms of outdoor and indoor coverage and per resource block rate, when deployed in mid (C-band) and high (millimeter-wave) frequency bands. For example, the obtained results unveil that the deployment of RISs enhances the coverage probability from 77 percent to 95 percent in the C-band and from 46 percent to 95 percent (92 percent in the presence of network interference) in the millimeter-wave band.