Electromagnetic Interference Cancellation for RIS-Assisted Communications

Abstract: Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-empowered communication is an emerging technology that has recently received growing attention as a potential candidate for next-generation wireless communications. Although RISs have shown the potential of manipulating the wireless channel through passive beamforming, it is shown that they can also bring undesired side effects, such as reflecting the electromagnetic interference (EMI) from the surrounding environment to the receiver side. In this study, we propose a novel EMI cancellation scheme to mitigate the impact of the EMI by exploiting its special time-domain structure and considering a clever passive beamforming method at the RIS. Compared to its benchmark, computer simulations show that the proposed scheme achieves superior performance in terms of the average signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and outage probability (OP), especially when the EMI power is comparable to the power of the information signal impinging on the RIS surface.