Multi-Functional Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface

In this paper, we propose a new multi-functional reconfigurable intelligent surface (MF-RIS) architecture. Different from conventional RIS that only reflects signals, MF-RIS supports multiple functionalities on one surface, including reflection, transmission, amplification, and energy harvesting. As such, MF-RIS is capable of overcoming the double-fading attenuation and achieving full-space coverage by harvesting energy from the base station (BS). The physical implementation and the signal model of MF-RIS are introduced from the perspective of wireless communications. Then, we formulate a sum rate (SR) maximization problem in an MF-RIS-aided non-orthogonal multiple access network. By jointly optimizing the transmit strategy of the BS and the coefficient of the MF-RIS, we design an iterative algorithm to solve the formulated non-convex problem efficiently. Simulation results show that: i) MF-RIS provides up to 98.8% higher SR gain than self-sustainable RIS. ii) There exists a non-trivial trade-off between throughput improvement and self-sustainability, due to the limited number of RIS elements.