IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications
13–16 September 2021 // Virtual Conference // By 6G Flagship

WS8 – Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for B5G/6G

Monday 13 September, 13:00-15:30 (UTC/GMT +3)

Scope 

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) have fast emerged as a prominent beyond 5G (B5G) candidate technology. RIS correspond to smart radio surfaces with many small antennas or reflecting metamaterial elements that receive and reflect electromagnetic (EM) waves with the capability of controlling the phase-shifts, thus offering tunable reflections. The distinctive characteristics of RIS in terms of reconfiguration of the propagation environment has motivated a host of potential new use cases. These include utilising RIS as smart reflectors to enhance performance of field deployments and as distributed massive antenna arrays for implementing low-complexity multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radios.   

This workshop, jointly organized between AIMM, ARIADNE, and RISE-6G European collaborative projects, intends to bring academic and industrial researchers together to stimulate and shape further development of RIS technology towards incorporation onto B5G/6G cellular standards, and eventually commercialization. The program covers all R&D aspects of RIS-based communications, for frequencies from sub-6 GHz to 100 GHz. Topics of interest will include but are not limited to the following: 

  • AI/ML techniques for RIS-based transceiver design and operation 
  • Use case definitions, business opportunities, and network planning aspects of RIS 
  • Fundamental limits and propagation modeling/measurements for RIS communications 
  • RIS for energy savings and EMF emission reduction  
  • Air-interface procedures for RIS including channel sounding and estimation 
  • System-level aspects of RIS including performance analysis and optimization 
  • Intelligent MIMO metasurfaces, dynamic metasurface antennas, and holographic beamforming 
  • Antenna array geometries and RF impairments compensation methods 
  • RIS prototype development and testbed implementation 
  • Radio resource allocation and MAC design for RIS 
  • Network architecture considerations and standardisation roadmap of RIS 
  • RIS interplay with multi-user and Massive MIMO communications and other state-of-the-art technologies 

Workshop chairs / organizers 

General Chair(s) 

Dr. Emilio Calvanese Strinati, CEA Leti 

Dr. Alain Mourad, InterDigital 

Dr.-Ing. Halid Hrasnica, Eurescom 

Technical Program Committee Chairs 

Dr. Arman Shojaeifard, InterDigital 

Prof. Marco Di Renzo, CentraleSupélec 

Prof. George C. Alexandropoulos, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens 

Program 

Workshop Keynotes 

Keynote 1: “Rebuilding the theoretical foundations of Communications and Computing”
Monday 13 September, 13:05-13:40 (UTC/GMT +3)

Prof. Mérouane Debbah, Technology Innovation Institute, Abu Dhabi

Keynote 2: “Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces for Wideband Communications: Challenges and Possible Solutions”
Monday 13 September, 13:53-14:28 (UTC/GMT +3)

Prof. Emil Björnson, Linköping University, Sweden

Keynote 3: “Network Operator requirements and use-cases for Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces”
Monday 13 September, 14:41-15:16 (UTC/GMT +3)

Fraser Burton, British Telecommunications plc, United Kingdom

Papers

Impact of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Size on Beamforming Efficiency
Giorgos Stratidakis (University of Piraeus, Greece); Sotiris Droulias (University of Piraeus Greece, Greece); Angeliki Alexiou (University of Piraeus, Greece)

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS): Eigenvalue Decomposition-Based Separate Channel Estimation
Salah Eddine Zegrar and Liza Afeef Omar Shehab El Din (Istanbul Medipol University, Turkey); Huseyin Arslan (University of South Florida & Istanbul Medipol University, USA)