Design of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Aided Cross-Media Communications

A novel reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided hybrid reflection/transmitter design is proposed for achieving information exchange in cross-media communications. In pursuit of the balance between energy efficiency and low-cost implementations, the cloud-management transmission protocol is adopted in the integrated multi-media system. Specifically, the messages of devices using heterogeneous propagation media, are firstly transmitted to the medium-matched AP, with the aid of the RIS-based dual-hop transmission. After the operation of intermediate frequency conversion, the access point (AP) uploads the received signals to the cloud for further demodulating and decoding process. Based on time division multiple access (TDMA), the cloud is able to distinguish the downlink data transmitted to different devices and transforms them into the input of the RIS controller via the dedicated control channel. Thereby, the RIS can passively reflect the incident carrier back into the original receiver with the exchanged information during the preallocated slots, following the idea of an index modulation-based transmitter. Moreover, the iterative optimization algorithm is utilized for optimizing the RIS phase, transmit rate and time allocation jointly in the delay-constrained cross-media communication model. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed RIS-based scheme can improve the end-to-end throughput than that of the AP-based transmission, the equal time allocation, the random and the discrete phase adjustment benchmarks.