RIS-IoE for Data-Driven Networks: New Mentalities, Trends and Preliminary Solutions

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) enables an intelligent and programmable communication environment for future sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks, owing to its native passive reflecting and smart phase shifts adjustment. To support the ultra data process for the Internet of Everything (IoE), in this article, new mentalities are investigated in details, such as artificial intelligence (AI) driven RIS, their corresponding designs, deployments, and optimizations. Considering applications and implementations with RIS, the integrating of emerging technologies is also studied to provide a significant performance enhancement in terms of the achievable capacity, power consumption and transmitting security, including physical layer security (PLS), simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT), non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and unmanned artificial vehicle (UAV). Then, to address the challenge of channel estimations, RIS-NOMA networks are comprehensively investigated with a simple case study, where the tough issue can be tackled by means of proposed decoding principles. Furthermore, future research trends and open issues of RIS-IoE networks are summarized associated with rate splitting multiple access (RSMA), massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO), and millimeter wave (mmWave), providing constructive directions for the subsequent study.