Optimal Deployment Strategy for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface under LoSD via Joint Active and Passive Beamforming

A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a new and revolutionizing technology to achieve spectrum-efficient (SE) and energy-efficient (EE) wireless networks. In this paper, we study an optimal deployment strategy of RIS in a line-of-sight domain (LoSD) based on an actual deployment scenario, which jointly considers path loss, transmit power and the energy efficiency of the system. Furthermore, we aim to minimize the transmit power via jointly optimizing its transmit beamforming and the reflect phase shifts of RIS, subject to the quality-of-service (QoS) constraint, namely, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) constraint at the user. However, this optimization problem is non-convex with intricately coupled variables. To tackle this challenge, we first apply proper transformation on the QoS constraint and then propose an efficient alternating optimization (AO) algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that compared to a conventional endpoint deployment strategy that simply deploys RIS at the transceiver ends, our proposed LoSD deployment strategy significantly reduces the transmit power by optimizing the available LoS links when a single RIS is relayed. The impact of the number of reflect elements on the system EE is also unveiled.