RIS in Indoor Environments: Benchmarking Against Ambient Propagation

The improvements in received signal power brought about by a reflective intelligent surface (RIS) might be overstated if background propagation mechanisms such as reflections, scattering, and diffraction are ignored. This paper addresses this issue for non-line-of-sight indoor settings, contrasting the energy conveyed by an RIS with the energy already reaching the receiver through environmental reflections. And, to prevent artifacts, such naturally occurring reflections are not modeled via approximate methods, but rather through a rigorous physics-based formulation. It is found that the environment contributes a level of energy commensurate with that of an ideal RIS of considerable size; to have substantial impact, an actual RIS would have to generously exceed this size.