Resource Allocation for Geographical Fairness in Multi-RIS-Aided Outdoor-to-Indoor Communications

In this paper, we study the resource allocation problem in multi-RIS-aided outdoor-to-indoor communications. Specifically, we aim to provide geographical fairness to ensure that users in different hotspot areas in a smart city can be served regardless of their location. We consider a scenario where RISs are deployed to extend coverage to indoor users in different buildings where there is limited network accessibility. This design is crucial in smart cities in the context of emergency communication and ubiquitous connectivity since it ensures service availability to as many users as possible independently of the locations. Thus, to achieve geographical fairness, we formulate a max-min fairness problem to maximize the minimum number of users served by each RIS by jointly optimizing the active precoding and RIS-based beamforming subject to power and quality of service constraints. The geographical location of users is directly linked to the RIS which means that users are served by the RIS closest to them. In this case, we ensure that a certain number of users can be supported by each RIS. The formulated problem is a mixed integer nonlinear program, which is challenging to solve directly using methods of convex optimization. Accordingly, we propose an efficient successive convex approximation-based alternating optimization algorithm to tackle the complexity of the formulated problem. The presented results show the performance gain of the proposed design in providing geographical fairness compared to the relevant benchmark schemes.