Special Issue on reconfigurable intelligent surface-assisted wireless communication systems

With the global standardisation and commercialisation of 5G networks, research attention in academia and industry has turned to 6G communication systems. These will need to provide very high data rates and connectivity density, as well as low-latency ultra-reliable communications in an energy-efficient way. Although significant performance gains can be achieved by increasing the number of antennas, migrating high-frequency bands, and deploying more access points, they will lead to high power, hardware and network maintenance costs, and excessive signal processing complexity. New enabling technologies need to be developed to tackle these challenges.

Due to recent advancements in electromagnetic (EM) metamaterials, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), also known as intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) or large intelligent surface (LIS), has emerged as a promising technology to resolve these challenges. An RIS is made of a programmable and nearly passive metasurface, which can be controlled by external signals to realise real-time manipulation on the EM responses of the reflected waves, such as the phase and amplitude. In adition, it is low cost, can easily coat environmental objects, and can realise customised propagation properties of the communication environment efficiently. This brings a huge increase in the degrees of freedom that can be exploited for system performance improvement. But RIS-assisted communication systems are not currently well-understood. This special issue aims to assemble the latest and high-quality research advances on the modelling, analysis, design and implementation of RIS-assisted wireless communication systems.

Topics covered:

We are interested in receiving submissions that consider reconfigurable intelligent surface-assisted wireless communication systems from the perspective of:

• Channel measurement and modelling
• Channel estimation and feedback
• Performance evaluation
• Transceiver optimisation
• Resource allocation
• Artificial intelligence
• Prototypes and test-beds
• Physical layer security
• Network design
• RIS-based Indoor/outdoor sensing
• Transmission protocol design/optimisation
• Integration of RIS with state-of-the-art wireless technologies (e.g., Massive MIMO, millimeter-wave communications, visible light communications, THz communication, IoT, UAV-aided communications, etc.)

Important dates:

• Submission deadline: 15 March 2022
• First notification: 15 May 2022
• Revised version deadline: 15 July 2022
• Final notification: 15 September 2022
• Publication date: December 2022

Submission instructions:

Please read the Guide for Authors before submitting. All articles should be submitted online via the editorial management system. Please select the option ‘SI on RIS’.

Guest editors:

• Xiao Li, Southeast University, China.
• Michail Matthaiou, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland.
• Shi Jin, Southeast University, China.
• Jiayi Zhang, Beijing Jiaotong University, China.
• Yu Han, Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore.