Investigation of RIS Enabled Mixed RF/VLC Relaying with Interference

The present research work aims at analyzing a variable gain amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying system with reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) systems to set-up a mixed communication system with visible light communication (VLC). The RIS and VLC forms of communication will hold utmost importance in the future generations of wireless communication. However, while implementation, various practical challenges are to be dealt with. One such challenge is the impact of interference on the reliability of the communication setup. To evaluate this, it has been assumed that the channel state information (CSI) aided amplify-and-forward (AF) relay node operates in the vicinity of multiple co-channel interferers (CCIs). For the considered system model, closed-form expressions have been derived for outage probability and bit error rate (BER) of the system. The formulation of symbol error rate (SER) has also been presented to generalize the findings. The analysis has been taken forward to showcase the impact of various system parameters such as number of elements in RIS, length and inclination angles of the VLC system along with number and strength of the interferers in system. It has been observed during investigation that the increment in the number of reflecting elements in the RIS has a major contribution in minimizing the signal degradation caused due to the multiple CCIs. Numerical results have been verified using the Monte-Carlo simulations.