Analysis of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided Wireless Communication: Potential Schemes, Standard Impact and Practical Challenges

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is one of the key potential technologies for 6G communication system. Generally, there are three types of RIS considering the use case and practical form, noted as fully-transparent RIS, half-transparent RIS and non-transparent RIS, respectively. Among the three types, half-transparent RIS plays a better balance between control flexibility and UE complexity, thus it may be the main form in RIS evolution. In this paper, we mainly focus on half-transparent RIS and propose a fundamental RIS-aided transmission scheme, together with the analysis on its air-interface requirement and standard impact. Moreover, based on the fundamental scheme, some potential extension schemes are proposed and analyzed, including multi-hop RIS-aided transmission and RIS-aided frequency hopping transmission. In the end, considerations on practical challenges for RIS from operator's perspective are provided.