To RIS or Not to RIS: A Ray-Tracing Study of RIS-Assisted Indoor 5G Communications

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) leverage arrays of programmable elements to manipulate incident electromagnetic waves dynamically. In non-line-of-sight conditions between a 5G base station and user equipment, RIS can act as a passive relay, redirecting signals to get around obstacles. In this paper, we use the open-source Sionna library to assess the performance gains of RIS-assisted 5 G indoor communication. Specifically, we use Sionna's ray tracing module to reconstruct propagation paths and analyze coverage maps and received signal strength (RSS). The results show that while RIS can improve the received signal, an accurate estimation of the transmitter and receiver locations is required.