On the Deployment of RIS-mounted UAV Networks

Abstract: Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) enable smart wireless environments by dynamically controlling signal propagation to enhance communication and localization. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can act as flying base stations and thus, improve system performance by avoiding signal blockages. In this paper, we propose a gradient ascent and coordinate search based method to determine the optimal location for a system that consists of a UAV and a RIS, where the UAV serves cellular users (CUs) and the RIS serves device-to-device (D2D) pairs. In particular, by optimizing the net throughput for both the D2D pairs and the CUs, the suggested method establishes the ideal location for the RIS-mounted UAV. We consider both line of sight (LoS) and non-LoS paths for the RIS and UAV to calculate the throughput while accounting for blockages in the system. The numerical results show that the proposed method performs better than the existing approaches in terms of both the net throughput and the user fairness.