Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-assisted Networks: Phase Alignment Categories

Abstract: The reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is one of the promising technology contributing to the next generation smart radio environment. The application scenarios include massive connectivity support, signal enhancement, and security protection. One crucial difficulty of analyzing the RIS-assisted networks is that the channel performance is sensitive to the change of user receiving direction. This paper tackles the problem by categorizing the RIS illuminated space into four categories: perfect alignment, coherent alignment, random alignment, and destructive alignment. These four categories cover all the possible phase alignment conditions that a user could experience within the overall $2$ pi solid angle of RIS-illuminated space. We perform analysis for each of these categories, deriving analytical expressions for the outage probability and diversity order. Simulation results are presented to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed analytical results.