Development and Assessment of Resource Management Solutions for Throughput Enhancement in a RIS-aided Mobile Network

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) stand out among the key technologies driving 6G mobile network development. In this paper, we develop and assess radio resource management solutions aimed to exploit the potential of RIS deployments for coverage and throughput enhancement for indoor users in 6G mobile networks. We introduce two heuristic algorithms that jointly control the cell-RIS-user association, user scheduling, transmit beamforming and the RIS’s reflective configuration, and compare these algorithms against a RIS-free benchmark. Simulation results are presented to (i) demonstrate the promising potential of RIS deployments in multi-cell/multi-user scenarios; (ii) reveal the inherent trade-off between coverage and throughput enhancement; and (iii) show the performance impact of distinct RIS deployment locations. Our study provides valuable insights for efficiently leveraging RIS in evolving mobile network architectures.