Investigating the Data Rate of Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces with Mutual Coupling and EMI

In wireless communications, various study findings have shown that a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) may successfully alter wireless wave parameters like phase and amplitude without requiring sophisticated signal processing and decoding at the receiver. However, it is necessary to take into account designing the surface under a realistic frequency selective fading channel. Because of this, we chose a wideband OFDM multi-user communication system based on an actual RIS setup that considers mutual coupling (MC) and electromagnetic interference (EMI). We used Hadamard matrix in the pilot transmissions to estimate the uncontrollable and the controllable channels. The best pilot configuration was selected to initialize the gradient descent method in order to calculate the optimal reflection coefficient that maximize the data rate for each user in the presence of EMI and MC. Simulation results revealed that the data rate has been degraded when considering EMI and MC for around 30 Mbits/s for each user. This confirms that both EMI and MC must be given considerable attention in our research due to their inevitable effects on the system performance.