UAV Swarm-Enabled Aerial Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) offers tremendous spectrum and energy efficiency in wireless networks by adjusting the amplitudes and/or phases of passive reflecting elements to optimize signal reflection. With the agility and mobility of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), RIS can be mounted on UAVs to enable three-dimensional signal reflection. Compared to the conventional terrestrial RIS (TRIS), the aerial RIS (ARIS) enjoys higher deployment flexibility, reliable air-to-ground links, and panoramic full-angle reflection. However, due to UAV's limited payload and battery capacity, it is difficult for a UAV to carry a RIS with a large number of reflecting elements. Thus, the scalability of the aperture gain could not be guaranteed. In practice, multiple UAVs can form a UAV swarm to enable the ARIS cooperatively. In this article, we first present an overview of the UAV swarm-enabled ARIS (SARIS), including its motivations and competitive advantages compared to TRIS and ARIS, as well as its new transformative applications in wireless networks. We then address the critical challenges of designing the SARIS by focusing on the beamforming design, SARIS channel estimation, and SARIS's deployment and movement. Next, the potential performance enhancement of SARIS is showcased and discussed with preliminary numerical results. Finally, open research opportunities are illustrated.