Hybrid RIS-assisted interference mitigation for heterogeneous networks

Abstract

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) have evolved as a low-cost and energy-efficient option to increase wireless communication capacity. In this research, we suggest using hybrid RIS (H-RIS) to reduce interference in heterogeneous networks (HetNet). In contrast to traditional passive RIS, a hybrid RIS is suggested, which is fitted with a few active elements to not only reflect but also amplify incident signals for a significant performance increase. By jointly optimising the passive and active coefficients of the H-RIS, we aim to maximise the rate of the small cell user (SUE). We presented an effective alternating optimisation (AO)-based phase shift matrix coefficients (AO-PMC) technique to tackle this problem by iteratively optimising these variables because the optimisation problem is not convex. The simulation results demonstrate that, in comparison to the passive RIS-assisted HetNet scheme and the scheme without RIS, the suggested scheme, with just 8% of active elements, can enable HetNet to gain superior spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE). The outcomes also demonstrate that, in the majority of the cases taken into account, H-RIS can outperform the active RIS-assisted HetNet scheme.