Guidelines for RIS Planning in IIoT Scenarios

Industrial IoT (IIoT) scenarios are known to be challenging in terms of propagation conditions and easily subjected to lack of coverage. For this reason, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) can be a smart solution to provide a satisfactory service for future artificial intelligence (AI)-based 6G networks. Nevertheless, RIS is a highly complex technology that requires a proper planning, ad-hoc management, and configuration to gain most benefits. Therefore, this paper aims to provide general guidelines to perform RIS planning in various IIoT scenarios. The planning is aimed at satisfying the stringent IIoT requirements in terms of data rate, reliability, and latency while minimizing the path loss. The results demonstrated the efficacy of RIS implementation in IIoT settings to enhance performance, with a mean path loss improvement of over 30 dB.