On the Rate and Energy Efficiency Comparison of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces with Relays

In this paper, we perform a performance comparison,
in terms of achievable rate and energy efficiency,
of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided next-generation
fronthaul network operating in the D band
with its relay-aided counterpart. For their energy efficiency
comparison, the insertion losses and power consumption of
the electronic components related with the deployed nodes
is taken into account. Numerical results show that the
RIS-aided network outperforms the relay-aided one, both
in terms of rate and energy efficiency, only for adequately
large RISs.