On the Effective Capacity of RIS-enabled mmWave Networks with Outdated CSI.

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have great potential to improve the coverage of mmWave networks; however, acquiring perfect channel state information (CSI) of a RIS-enabled mmWave network is very costly and should thus be done infrequently. At the same time, finding an optimal RIS configuration when CSI is outdated is challenging. To this end, this work aims to provide practical insights into the tradeoff between the outdatedness of the CSI and the system performance by using the effective capacity as analytical tool. We consider a RIS-enabled mmWave downlink where the base station (BS) operates under statistical quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. We find a closed-form expression for the effective capacity that incorporates the degree of optimism of packet scheduling and correlation strength between instantaneous and outdated CSI. Moreover, our analysis allows us to find optimal values of the signal-to-interference-plus-noise-ratio (SINR) distribution parameter and their impact on the effective capacity in different network scenarios. Simulation results demonstrate that better effective capacity can be achieved with suboptimal RIS configuration when the channel estimates are known to be outdated. It allows us to design system parameters that guarantee better performance while keeping the complexity and cost associated with channel estimation to a minimum.