Exploiting active STAR-RIS to enable URLLC in digitally-twinned Internet-of-Things networks

In the context of ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) in Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, conventional half-space coverage limits the flexibility of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) deployment. To overcome these constraints, this paper makes use of active simultaneously transmitting and reflecting RIS (STAR-RIS), which is seamlessly integrated into digital twin (DT) and mobile edge computing (MEC) frameworks. Our primary research objective is to achieve full-space coverage by enabling simultaneous transmission and reflection of the signals while improving uplink data transmission from IoT URLLC user nodes (UNs) to the base station (BS) with the assistance of active STAR-RIS, even in the presence of imperfect channel state information (CSI). We formulate the problem of minimizing total end-to-end (e2e) latency, computed using the alternating optimization (AO) algorithm. Subsequently, we have evaluated the performance of the AO algorithm against the stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm, which serves as the benchmark solution. The simulation outcomes delineate a performance evaluation under perfect and imperfect CSI scenarios. The AO algorithm outperforms SGD with latency reductions of 19.7% at N = 32 and 20.4% at N = 64. Increasing N from 32 to 64 results in a 39.3% latency reduction for AO, surpassing SGD’s 38.8%. However, the SGD algorithm consistently exhibits lower computational complexity compared to the AO algorithm. Additionally, the energy splitting mode achieves the system’s total e2e latency reductions of 28.4% over the mode switching mode and 11.04% over time switching mode. Furthermore, active STAR-RIS optimal beamforming (ARO) achieves ≈10% latency reduction over the predictive optimal beamforming (PRO), which itself surpasses active STAR-RIS with random beamforming (ARR) by ≈9%. This comparison considers key factors such as the power budget, the number of RIS elements, the caching capacity of the edge computing server (ECS), the number of IoT UNs, the minimum transmission rate, and maximum transmit power at BS of active STAR-RIS.