Resource Allocation and Sharing Methodologies When Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces Meet Multiple Base Stations

The 6G wireless systems are expected to have higher capacity, reliability, and energy efficiency than the existing cellular systems. Millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies offer high capacity at the cost of high attenuation and blockage losses. Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted mmWave networks consist of smaller antenna elements that control the propagation channel between the base station (BS) and the user by appropriately tuning the phase and the reflection of the incident electromagnetic signal. The deployment of RIS is considered to be an energy efficient solution to improve the coverage of regions with high blocking probability. However, if every BS is associated with one or more dedicated RIS, then the density of RIS increases proportionally with the density of BSs. Hence in this work, we propose RIS sharing mechanisms where multiple BSs share one RIS. We formulate resource allocation of RIS sharing in terms of time and the RIS elements as an optimization problem, and we propose heuristics to solve both. Further, we present detailed simulation results to compare time and the element based RIS sharing methods for various scenarios with the benchmark and the RIS system without sharing. The proposed time and element based RIS sharing methods improve throughput upto 53% and 25%, respectively, compared to the RIS system without sharing in specific scenarios.