Low-complexity cooperative active and passive beamforming multi-RIS-assisted communication networks

Abstract Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is a groundbreaking technology that has a significant potential for sixth generation (6G) networks. Its unique capability to control wireless environments makes it an attractive option. However, the spatial diversity increased by assisting users with all deployed RISs, this investigation has two drawbacks the high complexity design, and the received signals by the far RISs are severely attenuated. Therefore, we propose a RIS selection strategy to select the proper RISs as a pre-stage before the joint beamforming between the base station (BS) and RISs to reduce the high complexity of joint beamforming optimization. Furthermore, the joint active and passive beamforming problem based on the selection is formulated. Hence, achieving spatial diversity by examining cooperation between passive beamforming of multi-hop RIS, leads to a challenging problem. To tackle this issue, we design an algorithm for the RIS selection scheme. Also, to relax the non-convexity of the proposed problem, we decouple the problem into solvable subproblems by utilizing the fractional programming (FP) and quadratic transform (QT) optimization methods. Simulation results have demonstrated through different user locations the effectiveness of the selection strategy in performance enhancement by 30% in the sum rate, besides an obvious reduction in the complexity cost than other techniques.