Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Assisted Device-to-Device Communications

Abstract

With the evolution of 5G, 6G and beyond, device-to-device (D2D) communications have been developed as an energy-, and spectrum-efficient solution. However, D2D links are allowed to share the same spectrum resources with cellular links, which will bring significant interference to those cellular links. Fortunately, an emerging technique called reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), can mitigate aggravated interference caused by D2D links by adjusting phase shifts of the surface to create favorable beam steering. In this paper, we study an RIS-assisted single cell uplink communication scenario, where a cellular link and multiple D2D links share the same spectrum and an RIS is adopted to mitigate the mutual interference. The problem of maximizing total system rate is formulated by jointly optimizing transmission powers of all links and discrete phase shifts of the surface. To obtain practical solutions, we capitalize on alternating maximization and the problem is decomposed into two sub-problems. For the power allocation, the problem is a difference of concave functions (DC) problem, which is solved with the gradient descent method. For the phase shift optimization, a local search algorithm is utilized. Simulation results show that deploying the RIS with optimized phase shifts can effectively eliminate the interference in D2D networks.