Two-Way Communications via Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface

Abstract

The novel reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is an emerging technology which facilitates high spectrum and energy efficiencies in Beyond 5G and 6G wireless communication applications. Against this backdrop, this paper investigates two-way communications via reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) where two users communicate through a common RIS. We assume that uplink and downlink communication channels between two users and the RIS can be reciprocal. We first obtain the optimal phase adjustment at the RIS. We then derive the exact outage probability and the average throughput in closed-forms for single-element RIS. To evaluate multiple-element RIS, we first introduce a gamma approximation to model a product of Rayleigh random variables, and then derive approximations for the outage probability and the average throughput. For large average signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) \rho, asymptotic analXsis also shows that the outage decreases at the rate (\log(\rho)/\rho) where L is the number of elements, whereas the throughput increases with the rate \log(\rho).