Joint user scheduling and phase shift design for RIS assisted multi-cell MISO systems

This paper investigates the joint user scheduling and phase shift design for reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted multi-cell downlink systems. A closed-form ergodic sum spectral efficiency (SE) approximation is utilized as the optimization metric. Based on this approximation, we schedule the users, whose cascaded channels are mostly correlated with each other’s, to maximize each user’s effective signal. Moreover, the RIS phase shift is designed to be the mean of the scheduled users’ cascaded channel phases. With the proposed transmission design, we find the optimal RIS deployment to achieve the highest maximum throughput which depends only on the relative locations of the BSs and RIS. In addition, we consider a more practical discrete RIS phase shift design based on a discrete Fourier transform (DFT) codebook. Simulation results show that the proposed low-complexity scheduling algorithm performs well.