Hybrid RIS-Assisted Interference Mitigation for Spectrum Sharing

This paper explores reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) for mitigating cross-system interference in spectrum sharing applications. Unlike conventional reflect-only RIS that can only adjust the phase of the incoming signal, a hybrid RIS is considered that can configure the phase and modulus of the impinging signal by absorbing part of the signal energy. We investigate two spectrum sharing scenarios: (1) Spectral coexistence of radar and communication systems, where a convex optimization problem is formulated to minimize the Frobenius norm of the channel matrix from the communication base station to the radar receiver, and (2) Spectrum sharing in device-to-device (D2D) communications, where a max-min scheme that optimizes the worst-case signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) among the D2D links is formulated, and then solved through fractional programming. Numerical results show that with a sufficient number of elements, the hybrid RIS can in many cases completely eliminate the interference, unlike a conventional non-absorptive RIS.