RIS-assisted cellular networks with multiple D2D pairs: Outage and ergodic achievable rate✩

Yaxuan Liu; Yiyang Ni; Haitao Zhao; Yuxi Wang; Yan Cai

doi:10.1016/j.dcan.2025.08.008

›› 2026, Vol. 12 ›› Issue (1) :52 -65. DOI: 10.1016/j.dcan.2025.08.008

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RIS-assisted cellular networks with multiple D2D pairs: Outage and ergodic achievable rate^✩

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^a Institute of Artificial Intelligence Research, Jiangsu Second Normal University, Jiangsu Province, Nanjing 210013, China

^b Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Wireless Communications, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Jiangsu Province, Nanjing 210003, China

^c College of Electronic Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology, Hunan Province, Changsha 410073, China

^* 2021010103@njupt.edu.cn (Y. Liu), niyy@jssnu.edu.cn (Y. Ni), haitaozhao@nudt.edu.cn (H. Zhao), wyx@jssnu.edu.cn (Y. Wang), caiy@njupt.edu.cn (Y. Cai).

Yaxuan Liu received the Ph.D. degree in Nanjing University of Posts and Telecom-munications (NJUPT), Nanjing, China in 2025. She is currently a Lecture with Jiangsu Second Normal University and the Jiangsu Institute of Educational Science Research. Her research interests include wireless communications and the Internet of Things.

Yiyang Ni received the B.S. degree in communications engineering and the Ph.D. degree from the Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications (NJUPT), Nanjing, China, in 2008 and 2016, respectively. She is currently a Professor with Jiangsu Second Normal University and the Jiangsu Institute of Educational Science Research. Her research interests include wireless communications and the Internet of Things.

Haitao Zhao received the B.E., M.Sc., and Ph.D. degrees from the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT), China, in 2002, 2004, and 2009, respectively. He visited the Institute of ECIT, Queen’s University of Belfast, U.K., and Hong Kong Baptist Univer-sity. He is currently a Professor with the College of Electronic Science and Technology, NUDT. His main research interests include wireless communications, cognitive radio net-works, and intelligent self-organized networks. He has served as a TPC Member for IEEE ICC’14-24, Globecom’16-24, and a Guest Editor for Physical Communications and IEEE Communications Magazine.

Yuxi Wang received the B.S. degree in computer science and technology from Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China, in 2001, and the M.S. degree in computer technology from the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, in 2009. He is currently an Associate Professor with the College of Mathematics and Information Tech-nology, Jiangsu Second Normal University. His research interests include wireless sensor networks and wireless communications.

Yan Cai received the Ph.D. degree from Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications (NJUPT), Nanjing, China, in 2016. She is currently a Professor in Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications. Her research interests include wireless communication theory, cognitive radio networks, D2D communications and relay systems for wireless communications and IOT technology.

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Abstract

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS) is envisioned as a promising technology to improve the system capacity of 6G network, by controlling the electromagnetic wave propagation. Most existing works use the Central Limit Theorem (CLT) to analyze the performance of RIS-assisted systems for large number of reflective elements. However, the assumption of extremely large number of elements may not be practical in the actual situation. In addition, the CLT-based approximation yields an inaccurate scaling law of the outage probability when the transmit Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) tends to infinity. Motivated by these limitations, in this paper, we investigate the performance of RIS-assisted cellular networks with multiple Device-to-Device (D2D) users under the general fading channels, i.e., Nakagami-𝑚 fading channels. We propose a tractable solution to evaluate the outage probability and the ergodic achievable rate, which is accurate for any number of reflective elements, any network topology, as well as any SNR. In addition, the accurate approximations for the high SNR case and the large number of reflective elements case are further derived in simpler closed form. Numerical results verify the accuracy of our analytical results and analyze the performance between CLT and the proposed method.

Keywords

Reconfigurable intelligent surface / 6G cellular networks / Device-to-device / Outage probability / Ergodic achievable rate / Nakagami-m fading

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Yaxuan Liu, Yiyang Ni, Haitao Zhao, Yuxi Wang, Yan Cai. RIS-assisted cellular networks with multiple D2D pairs: Outage and ergodic achievable rate^✩. , 2026, 12(1): 52-65 DOI:10.1016/j.dcan.2025.08.008

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CRediT authorship contribution statement

Yaxuan Liu: Writing-review & editing, Writing-original draft, Formal analysis, Data curation. Yiyang Ni: Writing-review & editing. Haitao Zhao: Writing-review & editing. Yuxi Wang: Writing-review & editing. Yan Cai: Writing-review & editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests: Yaxuan Liu reports financial support was provided by Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province. Yiyang Ni reports financial support was provided by National Natural Science Foundation of China. If there are other authors, they declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by Jiangsu Provincial Key Research and Development Program (No. BE2023022-2), in part by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 62471204, 92367302), in part by Major Natural Science Foundation of the Higher Education Institutions of Jiangsu Province (No. 24KJA510003).

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