Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided AirComp for Large-Scale IoT Networks

Traditional wireless data aggregation (WDA) technology based on the principle of separated communication and computation is difficult to achieve large-scale access under the limited spectrum resources, especially in scenarios with strict constraints on time latency. As an outstanding fast WDA technology, over-the-air computation (AirComp) can reduce transmit time while improving spectrum efficiency. Most edge devices in wireless networks are battery-powered. Therefore, optimizing the transmit power of devices could prolong the life cycle of nodes and save the system power consumption. In this research, we aim to minimize the device transmit power subject to aggregation error constraint. Additionally, to improve the harsh wireless transmission environment, we use reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) to assist AirComp. To solve the presented nonconvex problem, we present a two-step solution method. Specifically, we introduce matrix lifting technology to transform the original problems into semidefinite programming problems (SDP) in the first step and then propose an alternate difference-of-convex (DC) framework to solve the SDP subproblems. The numerical results show that RIS-assisted communication can greatly save system power and reduce aggregation error. And the proposed alternate DC method is superior to the alternate semidefinite relaxation (SDR) method.