Energy-Efficient STAR-RIS-Aided MU-MIMO for Next-Generation URLLC Systems

As a revolutionary paradigm for green ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC), reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have been considered as a prominent architecture for enabling next-generation communication systems. Recently, a novel RIS framework, called simultaneous transmitting and reflecting (STAR-RIS), has been proposed to facilitate both transmission and reflection through the meta-material surface, leading to full-space coverage and even better beamforming flexibility than conventional RIS. This paper investigates an energy-efficient resource allocation design scheme for a STAR-RIS-aided downlink system under various STAR-RIS modes to deliver energy-efficient URLLC services by jointly optimizing the beamforming at the base station (BS) and STAR-RIS, subject to the given requirements on the rate, packet-error probability, and latency. Owing to the non-convex and NP-hard nature of the formulated problem, we propose an alternating optimization framework that obtains suboptimal solutions to the problems of beamforming design at the BS and STAR-RIS, respectively, in an iterative manner by exploiting fractional programming and successive convex approximation approaches. Simulation results confirm that the TS, ES, and MS modes of STAR-RIS achieve approximately 30%-50%, 20%-40%, and 10%-15%, respectively better performance than a conventional reflecting-only RIS while guaranteeing strict reliability and latency requirements of URLLC. Specifically, among all the possible modes of STAR-RIS, the time-splitting mode renders an effective solution due to its better interference management.