Discrete Phase Shifts for Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces in OFDM Communications

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) in wireless communications allows the network provider to control the scattering, reflection, and refraction characteristics of the electromagnetic signals. Different research results have shown (RIS) can effectively control the properties of the wireless waves like Amplitude and Phase without complex equalization and decoding at the receiver. Nevertheless, configuring the surface under practical frequency selective fading channel must be considered over the whole bandwidth consequently we took into consideration the wideband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication system based on practical (RIS) setup with different phase shifts per each element in the surface. We used the communication setup considered in the IEEE signal processing Cup 2021 to investigate the user data rate enhancement of such (RIS) surfaces using different discrete phase shifts with equal spacing. Simulation results have shown that the data rate improved when using high resolution of discrete phase shifts per each RIS element