A Path to Smart Radio Environments: An Industrial Viewpoint on Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

TLDR

The rapid standardization and commercialization of 5G has spurred interest in new technologies such as reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), which can passively reshape the propagation environment and are already the focus of research, prototype development, and emerging standardization discussions at regional and international bodies. This article aims to provide an industrial perspective on RIS and outline a roadmap to enable their commercial deployment. RISs are expected to extend cell coverage and increase overall network throughput.

Abstract

With the standardization and commercialization completed in an unforeseen pace for the 5th generation (5G) of wireless networks, researchers, engineers and executives from academia and industry have turned their attention to new candidate technologies that can support the next generation of wireless networks. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), sometimes referred to as intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS), have been identified as a potential component of future wireless networks, because they can reconfigure the propagation environment by using low-cost passive devices. With the aid of RISs, the coverage of a cell can be expected to increase, and with it the overall throughput of the network. RISs have not only become an attractive research area but have also triggered several collaborative research projects that aim to develop innovative algorithmic solutions and hardware demonstrators and prototypes. At the same time, technical discussions and activities toward standardization have already taken off in some countries. Promoting RISs to be integrated into future commercial networks and to become a commercial success require significant standardization efforts that need to take place at regional-level standards developing organizations (SDO) and international-level SDOs, such as the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP). While many research papers study how RISs are optimized and what their ultimate performance limits are, little effort has so far been devoted to analyzing the challenges to commercialize RISs and how RISs can be standardized. This article intends to shed some light on RISs from an industrial view-point and to provide a roadmap in order to make RISs feasible in industry.