Opportunistic RIS-assisted rate splitting transmission in coordinated multiple points networks

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) have attracted a great deal of interests due to its potential contributions to the next-generation mobile networks. The deployment of RIS in multi-user wireless networks promises to reduce system hardware costs, signal processing complexity, as well as energy consumption due to its small size, lightweight and ability to actively shape the wireless propagation environment. Based on the ability to suitably adjust the phase shifts according to the dynamic wireless environment, the transmission rate and energy efficiency can be improved by deploying software-controlled meta-surfaces to reflect signals from the source to the destination. This paper proposes a RIS-assisted rate splitting-based transmission strategy in the Coordinated Multiple Points (CoMP) transmission network. The obtained results demonstrated that the proposed opportunistic RIS-assisted rate splitting transmission outperforms the conventional jointly transmission Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) strategy and the mutual-aided NOMA strategy in terms of outage probability under a target power level when the obstacle exists. Along with the one-off control RIS, the network spectral efficiency can be improved significantly by the proposed opportunistic RIS-assisted (O-RIS) rate splitting strategy under the target channel interference levels.