RIS-Enhanced Information-Decoupled Symbiotic Radio Over Broadcasting Signals

This paper studies a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-enhanced decoupled symbiotic radio (SR) system in which a primary transmitter delivers common data to multiple primary receivers (PRs), while a RIS-based backscatter device sends secondary data to a backscatter receiver (BRx). Unlike conventional SR, the BRx performs energy detection and never decodes the primary signal, thereby removing ambiguity and preventing exposure of the primary payload to unintended receivers. In this paper, we formulate the problem as the minimization of the transmit power subject to a common broadcast rate constraint across all PRs and a bit error rate (BER) constraint at the BRx. The problem is nonconvex due to the unit-modulus RIS constraint and coupled quadratic forms. Leveraging a rate-balanced reformulation and a monotonic BER ratio characterization, we develop a low-complexity penalty-based block coordinate descent algorithm with closed-form updates. Numerical results show fast convergence of the proposed algorithm and reduced power consumption of the considered RIS-enhanced information-decoupled SR system over conventional SR baselines.