An Innovative Infrastructure Based on Shape-Adaptive RIS for Smart Industrial IoTs

Abstract

Industrial Internet of Things (IoTs) applications will have higher demands in terms of system capacity and wireless transmission performance in the future. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) for the wireless transmission environment reconstruction is currently a research hotspot in the field of wireless communication. In this paper, RIS is applied to industrial IoTs scenarios, and an innovative infrastructure based on shape-adaptive RIS suitable for smart industrial IoTs is proposed. Based on the many advantages of RIS, the proposed infrastructure can meet the significant demands of industrial IoTs in terms of network coverage, system capacity, transmission rate, and communication security. Further, in order to achieve flexible RIS phase adjustment in wider ranges, in this paper, a shape-adaptive RIS mechanism is proposed to regulate RIS-reflected waves in the shape domain, which can be achieved by scalable RIS unit sizes and macroscopically changeable physical shapes. This mechanism can reduce the requirements for RIS-controller and artificial-unit design and expand the spatial distribution of reflected beams, whereas this is difficult to achieve by conventional regulations in the spatial, time, and frequency domains. The simulation results show that, in terms of system-coverage probability, the system performance of RIS is better than that of general communication systems, and the performance of the deformable RIS-based system is the best. In terms of channel gain, the performance of the deformable RIS is related to its surface size. Moreover, the path loss caused by the long-distance transmission of wireless signals can be compensated for by increasing the RIS surface area.