Joint Scheduling of eMBB and URLLC Services in RIS-Aided Downlink Cellular Networks

This paper proposes a novel framework to emerge the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) in cellular networks wherein enhanced mobile broadband (eMBB) and ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) services coexist. In order to avoid the violation in the URLLC latency requirements, the framework proposes RIS phase shift matrix that enhances the URLLC reliability is proactively designed at the beginning of the time slot. The system model consists of a single base station (BS) and a single RIS which deployed to enhance the channel environments of the eMBB and the URLLC users. To allocates the eMBB users, we formulate a time-slot basis eMBB allocation problem which has the goal of maximizing the eMBB sum-rate by jointly optimizing the power allocation at the BS and the RIS phase shift matrix while satisfying the eMBB rate constraint. Since the formulated problem is a non-convex problem which hard to be solved directly, we adopt the alternating optimization approach to decompose the eMBB allocation problem optimization problem into a power allocation and a RIS phase shift matrix sub-problems. Then, the URLLC allocation problem is formulated as a multi-objective problem with the goal of maximizing the URLLC admitted packets and minimizing the eMBB rate loss by jointly optimizing the power and frequency allocation. Then, we proposed a heuristic algorithm to allocate the URLLC load. The proposed algorithm has a low time complexity which makes it a efficient method for multiplexing URLLC and eMBB traffics. Finally, simulation results show that using only 60 RIS elements, we observe that the proposed scheme achieves around 99.99% URLLC packets admission rate compared to 95.6% when there is no RIS, while also achieving up to 70% enhancement on the eMBB rates.