Randomized Control of Wireless Temporal Coherence Via Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface

A reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) can shape the wireless propagation channel by inducing controlled phase shift variations to the impinging signals. Multiple works have considered the use of RIS with time-varying configurations of reflection coefficients. In this work, we use the RIS to control the channel coherence time and introduce a generalized discrete-time-varying channel model for RIS-aided systems. We characterize the temporal variation of the channel correlation by assuming that the configuration of RIS' elements changes at every time step. The analysis converges to a randomized framework to control the channel coherence time by setting the number of RIS' elements and their phase shifts. The main result is a framework for a flexible block-fading model, where the number of samples within a coherence block can be dynamically adapted.