Fine-Grained Analysis of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface-Assisted mmWave Networks

Abstract

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have emerged as a promising technology for millimeter wave (mmWave) networks. In this paper, we utilize tools from stochastic geometry to study the performance of a RIS-assisted mmWave cellular network. Specifically, the locations of the base stations (BSs) and the midpoints of the blockage are modeled as two independent Poisson point processes (PPPs), where the blockages are modeled by a Boolean model and a fraction of the blockages are coated with RISs. The particular characteristics of mmWave communications, i.e., directional beamforming and different path loss laws for line-of-sight (LOS) and non-line-of-sight (NLOS) propagation, are incorporated into our analysis. We derive analytical expressions for the success probability and the area spectral efficiency. The success probability under the special case where the blockage parameter is sufficiently small is also derived. Numerical results demonstrate that better coverage performance and higher energy efficiency can be achieved by a large-scale deployment of RISs. In addition, the tradeoff between the BS and RIS densities is investigated and the results show that the RISs can indeed enable the traditional networks to improve the success probability, especially for the cell-edge region, with limited power consumption.