Wireless energy harvesting for autonomous reconfigurable intelligent surfaces

In the current contribution, we examine the feasibility of fully-energy-autonomous operation of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) through wireless energy harvesting (EH) from incident information signals. Towards this, we first identify the main RIS energy-consuming components and present a...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Ntontin, Konstantinos, Boulogeorgos, Alexandros Apostolos A., Björnson, Emil, Martins, Wallace Alves, Kisseleff, Steven, Abadal Cavallé, Sergi|||0000-0003-0941-0260, Alarcón Cot, Eduardo José|||0000-0001-7663-7153, Papazafeiropoulos, Anastasios, Lazarakis, Fotis, Chatzinotas, Symeon
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2022
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/375467
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/375467
https://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TGCN.2022.3201190
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Telecommunication -- Traffic -- Management
Computer networks -- Energy consumption
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces
Autonomous operation
Simultaneous energy harvesting and beamsteering
Unit-cell splitting architecture
Telecomunicació -- Tràfic -- Gestió
Ordinadors, Xarxes d' -- Consum d'energia
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Enginyeria de la telecomunicació::Telemàtica i xarxes d'ordinadors
Descripción
Sumario:In the current contribution, we examine the feasibility of fully-energy-autonomous operation of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) through wireless energy harvesting (EH) from incident information signals. Towards this, we first identify the main RIS energy-consuming components and present a suitable and accurate energy-consumption model that is based on the recently proposed integrated controller architecture and includes the energy consumption needed for channel estimation. Building on this model, we introduce a novel RIS architecture that enables EH through RIS unit-cell (UC) splitting. Subsequently, we introduce an EH policy, where a subset of the UCs is used for beamsteering, while the remaining UCs absorb energy. In particular, we formulate a subset allocation optimization problem that aims at maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver without violating the RIS’s energy consumption demands. As a problem solution, we present low-complexity heuristic algorithms. The presented numerical results reveal the feasibility of the proposed architecture and the efficiency of the presented algorithms with respect to both the optimal and very high-complexity brute-force approach and the one corresponding to random subset selection. Furthermore, the results reveal how important the placement of the RIS as close to the transmitter as possible is, for increasing the harvesting effectiveness.