Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Deployment and Orientation in Beyond 5G Multicast Networks

As 5G evolves into a unifying connectivity fabric, new capabilities will emerge, enabling and enhancing such services as extended reality (XR), holographic telepresence, and other high-speed immersive experience. These multimedia applications demand strict latency, improved network capacity and coverage, and mobility support. Multicast transmissions, highly directional communications, and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs), combined with artificial intelligence, are expected to ensure such requirements. We present and solve the optimal RIS deployment and orientation problem for cellular highly-directional multicast connectivity based on the multilevel facility location model. We then develop and test two artificial intelligence alternatives, which offer a close-to-optimal solution with lower computational complexity. Our numerical results demonstrate that optimally deploying RISs enhances the average network throughput and latency of directional multicasting.