The Road Towards RIS Standardization

As a vital component of smart and sustainable radio environment, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) plays a critical role in future wireless communications systems. The abilities of RIS to alter wireless propagation conditions with lower cost of deployment and lower energy consumption make it a strong candidate technology for the next generation networks. Given these merits studied by the academia, the industrial community has taken steps to standardize RIS in order to harmonize it with the current system design. The ETSI ISG RIS is one of the earliest standardization group to study RIS and their activities are provided in details. Particularly, a variety of use cases and deployment scenarios are identified, modelling of RIS-assisted communication channels is studied, and reference archetectures and future standardization impact are also analyzed. The future of RIS standardization lies in the industrial consensus to mature this technology further and address its engineering challenges.