Active RIS vs. Passive RIS: Which Will Prevail in 6G?

TLDR

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are emerging as a promising 6G technology, yet passive RISs suffer from limited capacity gains due to multiplicative fading when strong direct links exist. This paper proposes active RISs to overcome the fundamental limitation of passive RISs. Active RISs amplify reflected signals via integrated amplifiers; the authors develop and experimentally verify a signal model, analyze asymptotic performance, and formulate a sum‑rate maximization problem solved by joint transmit beamforming and reflect precoding. Simulations show passive RISs yield only a 22 % sum‑rate gain, whereas active RISs achieve a 130 % gain, effectively mitigating multiplicative fading.

Abstract

As a revolutionary paradigm for controlling wireless channels, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have emerged as a candidate technology for future 6G networks. However, due to the "multiplicative fading" effect, the existing passive RISs only achieve limited capacity gains in many scenarios with strong direct links. In this paper, the concept of active RISs is proposed to overcome this fundamental limitation. Unlike passive RISs that reflect signals without amplification, active RISs can amplify the reflected signals via amplifiers integrated into their elements. To characterize the signal amplification and incorporate the noise introduced by the active components, we develop and verify the signal model of active RISs through the experimental measurements based on a fabricated active RIS element. Based on the verified signal model, we further analyze the asymptotic performance of active RISs to reveal the substantial capacity gain they provide for wireless communications. Finally, we formulate the sum-rate maximization problem for an active RIS aided multi-user multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) system and a joint transmit beamforming and reflect precoding scheme is proposed to solve this problem. Simulation results show that, in a typical wireless system, passive RISs can realize only a limited sum-rate gain of 22%, while active RISs can achieve a significant sum-rate gain of 130%, thus overcoming the "multiplicative fading" effect.