# An Energy-efficient Aerial Backhaul System with Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.01723 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01723/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Apr 2021.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Bridging Earth and Space: A Survey on HAPS for Non-Terrestrial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19731/) (2025)
- [Joint User Association, Interference Cancellation and Power Control for Multi-IRS Assisted UAV Communications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04786/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we propose a novel wireless architecture, mounted on a high-altitude aerial platform, which is enabled by reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS). By installing RIS on the aerial platform, rich line-of-sight and full-area coverage can be achieved, thereby, overcoming the limitations of the conventional terrestrial RIS. We consider a scenario where a sudden increase in traffic in an urban area triggers authorities to rapidly deploy unmanned-aerial vehicle base stations (UAV-BSs) to serve the ground users. In this scenario, since the direct backhaul link from the ground source can be blocked due to several obstacles from the urban area, we propose reflecting the backhaul signal using aerial-RIS so that it successfully reaches the UAV-BSs. We jointly optimize the placement and array-partition strategies of aerial-RIS and the phases of RIS elements, which leads to an increase in energy-efficiency of every UAV-BS. We show that the complexity of our algorithm can be bounded by the quadratic order, thus implying high computational efficiency. We verify the performance of the proposed algorithm via extensive numerical evaluations and show that our method achieves an outstanding performance in terms of energy-efficiency compared to benchmark schemes.