Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (IRS) or Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) or whatever their name is, are being discussed in the literature for years now as a great way to control the wireless channel (controled environment) and increase the spectrum and energy efficiency.
My question is that we know that many companies are still struggling to make ends meet when in comes to 5G small cells deployment and this RIS or IRS will increase the cost of coverage extensively with the higher frequencies, so will it be economically feasible for all companies to adopt and deploy? and what specific scenarios would be more encouraging?
I appreciate any input in this matter.
Best regards
You can find many papers claiming that the IRS/RIS technology will have low cost and be useful for almost everything, but this is unfortunately speculation that has turned into an "urban legend".
The truth is that a large number of researchers currently trying bring the IRS/RIS technology to reality, and it is first when we have commercial products that we can determined if the cost is low or high. A characteristic feature of IRS is that one needs many elements, but each element has relatively simple hardware (compared to an active antenna array). Whether "many elements x low cost per element" turns into a small or large number will have to be proved!
If you haven't already done it, I recommend you to read my paper "Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Three Myths and Two Critical Questions" (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.03377.pdf), where we elaborate more on these things.
Thanks so much for the amazing answer Dr. Emil Björnson , you have been very active in this field and personally most of my information about it is from your papers and videos so thanks for all your efforts and interst. I will read the paper ASAP.
Best regards
I have some information on the hardware costs. For example, we paid around £5000 for the 1m x 0.7 m 3-bit RIS utilised in Preprint High-Resolution Programmable Scattering for Wireless Coverag...
for the fabrication alone (i.e., not counting development time). This work is at sub-6 GHz. The largest cost was the thousands of PIN diodes and the low-loss PTFE material for the substrate. We have been quoted a similar price for a 1m x 1m dual-linear polarised 1-bit design with full local control. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested in hardware implementations and measurements.Best wishes,
James
Thank you very much Professor Dr. @ Emil Björnson for your insightful answer. You are one of the prominent researchers in this field. I follow your research on this field. Thank you for highly supporting the community with your pioneering researches.
Thanks so much for your answer and clarification James Rains it is very helpful.
Best regards
Another challenge for widespread realization:
Even if RIS can be fabricated at a low cost, there is competition from other commercial uses such as advertising displays and solar-panel energy harvesting
in coating building surfaces.
Some challenges and solutions (for win-win stakeholder satisfaction) are discussed in our new paper.
"Paving the Way For Economically Accepted and Technically Pronounced Smart Radio Environment"
Transparent multi-skin (multi-function) is recommended.
http://www.cic-chinacommunications.cn/EN/Y2022/V19/I8/247
Article Paving the Way For Economically Accepted and Technically Pro...
Thanks so much Mostafa Salah for the great answer.
Best regards.
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