Executive Summary : | The future industrial automation scenario, particularly in India, is expected to experience significant disruption due to the increasing push towards indigenous manufacturing, adoption of industry 4.0 standards, and the development of 5G technologies. Factory environments will need to sustain wireless communication services with diverse requirements, including connectivity, network availability, latency, and throughput. However, roaming blockages in factory floors limit effective propagation of radio signals and reduce wireless coverage. Researchers have proposed multi-device cooperation, time-frequency diversity, and antenna diversity schemes to address this challenge, but these solutions face high overhead requirements and complex coordination algorithms. This project aims to leverage reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) to sustain ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) services in industrial internet of things (IIoT) networks. The project will develop optimal RIS placement strategies, reconfiguration algorithms, and medium access control (MAC) strategies for RIS installation in an industrial automation environment. The proposed solutions will consider key performance indicators (KPIs), blockage characteristics, and other system parameters. The project has both analytical and experimental aspects, with the first part focusing on algorithm development of RIS-aided communication strategies, optimization of RIS placement in the network, and RIS reconfiguration algorithms for serving mobile IoT devices. The second part will experimentally demonstrate coverage extension for IIoT devices using a RIS-aided communication link, with a RIS controller capable of functioning in static-device centric, geographical-area centric, and real-time reconfiguration modes. |