Joint Power Control and Passive Beamforming in Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Assisted User-Centric Networks

As a promising technology with disruptive innovation, user-centric network can meet the data traffic demand and user service demand in the future mobile networks. It completely transforms the traditional cell-centric paradigm into user-centric paradigm, requiring the deployment of a large number of access points (APs). However, the massive deployment of APs leads to issues such as high hardware cost, huge power consumption and complex interference management. Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), as another promising technology, can expand signal coverage, suppress interference, reduce hardware cost and power consumption. Inspired by this, we propose a novel RIS assisted user-centric network that uses RIS to replace some low utilization APs to reduce cost as well as power consumption, and deploy more RIS to achieve energy-efficient user-centric communication. In order to take full advantages of RIS, we jointly optimize passive beamforming at RIS and power control at AP to maximize the energy efficiency of the network. Since this problem is intractable and non-convex, an effectively alternating optimization algorithm, capitalizing on fractional programming and successive lower-bound maximization is proposed. The simulation results verify that the proposed algorithm outperforms reference algorithms in terms of energy efficiency and sum rate.