Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) hold promising technical prospects for 6G wireless communications to enhance system capacity, coverage and sum-rate. Unlike existing studies deploying only passive or active RISs, this paper adopts a novel hybrid RIS architecture that optimally allocates the number of active and passive elements. Under fixed quantities of both RIS element types in the fixed hybrid RIS, it simultaneously increases the number of base station antennas and served users, focusing on solving rate optimization for hybrid RIS-assisted MISO systems deployed in various scenarios. This paper establishes a fundamental model for hybrid RIS reflection signals. To better characterize the performance of the proposed hybrid RIS architecture, an optimization problem is formulated to maximize the sum-rate of the hybrid RIS-assisted multi-user, multiple-input, single-output (MU-MISO) system. An efficient algorithm is proposed combining fractional programming (FP), alternating optimization, and Lagrange duality transformation. Simulation results demonstrate that with hybrid RIS assistance, the system’s sum-rate gain increases by 49.1% and 40%, respectively, compared to systems with only active RIS deployment. This achieves higher sum-rate gains at lower power consumption.
Pang et al. (Tue,) studied this question.