Blockage Effects in RIS-enabled Communication

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) are considered an important candidate to improve the performance of communication systems via controlling the propagation medium. There are number of potential scenarios for RIS-enabled systems in the non-line-of-sight communication scenarios while having blockages between transmitter and receiver. However, blockages may also occur between transmitter-RIS and RIS-receiver channels. This work proposes a realistic system model with RIS in the presence of blockages within the whole communication channels. For the considered system model, the achievable data rate is derived analytically in the environment where the blockage model follows the Poisson point process. Discrete phase shifting RIS is used in the proposed system due to the practical deployment scenarios. Thus, the effects of the number of RIS elements, coding bits number, and density of the blockages on achievable data rate are investigated. The performance of the proposed system depends heavily on the intensity of the blockages. The accuracy of the analytical results is verified via extensive simulations.