Coverage and Rate Performance Analysis of Multi-RIS-Assisted Dual-Hop mmWave Networks

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) communication, which operates at high frequencies, has gained extensive research interest due to its significantly wide spectrum and short wavelengths. However, mmWave communication suffers from the notable drawbacks as follows: i) The mmWave signals are sensitive to the blockage, which is caused by the weak diffraction ability of mmWave propagation; ii) Even though the introduction of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) can overcome the performance degradation caused by serve path loss, the location of users and RISs as well as their densities incur a significant impact on the coverage and rate performance; iii) When the RISs’ density is very high, i.e., the network becomes extremely dense, a user sees several line-of-sight RISs and thus experiences significant interference, which degrades the system performance. Motivated by the challenges above, we first analyze distributed multi-RIS-aided mmWave communication system over Nakagami-<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">m</i> fading from the stochastic geometry perspective. To be specific, we analyze the end-to-end (E2E) signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) coverage and rate performance of the system. To improve the system performance in terms of the E2E SINR coverage probability and rate, we study the optimization of the phase-shifting control of the distributed RISs and optimize the E2E SINR coverage particularly when deploying a large number of reflecting elements in RISs. To facilitate the study, we optimize the dynamic association criterion between the RIS and destination. Furthermore, we optimize the multi-RIS-user association based on the physical distances between the RISs and destination by exploiting the maximum-ratio transmission. Numerical and simulation results indicate that the deployment of distributed RISs can significantly improve the E2E SINR coverage probability and achievable rate of the system compared to the selected benchmarks.