Coverage Enhancement by Deploying RIS in 5G Commercial Mobile Networks: Field Trials

With the envisioned demands of extremely high coverage and excellent network capacity, the 6G system is a focus of the attention, in both academia and industry. For the upcoming 6G, the communications networks currently deployed are supposed to be improved by some promising technologies, such as reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), due to their superior capability in manipulating electromagnetic waves. However, little research has been done on the performance of coverage enhancement, when RIS is deployed in current Commercial Mobile Networks. In this article, a flexibly tunable and readily programmable RIS is fabricated, composed of a large number of unit cells, and capable of performing arbitrary beamforming toward the desired direction. In addition, we report on the world's first field trials on RIS performance of enhancing coverage, in current 5G Commercial Mobile Networks - conducted in various urban scenarios, with the fabricated and unprecedented RIS. The field trial results show that deploying RIS into the current 5G communications networks brings significant improvements on user experiences (such as extending the coverage and enhancing the throughput), which may serve as evidence of the prospects for its further, and more extensive use.