Design and Performance Analysis of an RIS-Empowered RM-DCSK System for Wireless Powered Communication

This paper proposed a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-empowered reference-modulated differential chaos shift keying (RM-DCSK) wireless powered communication (WPC) system. As a noncoherent chaotic communication scheme, the proposed system exploits the reference reuse property of RM-DCSK, where the reference signal simultaneously carries data information, thereby improving spectral efficiency while maintaining noncoherent and channel-estimation-free reception with low receiver circuit complexity. Furthermore, RIS is utilized to reconfigure the propagation environment and mitigate the path loss effect of WPC links. At the user equipment (UE), a harvest-store-use (HSU) energy harvesting and finite-buffer model is developed, and a threshold-based on/off transmission policy is adopted to enable sustainable uplink transmission. To quantify the gain of energy buffering and management, a bufferless baseline system is further established. Closed-form bit error rate (BER) expressions are obtained under multi-path Rayleigh fading channels for both the proposed RIS-RM-DCSK-WPC system and bufferless baseline system. Finally, simulation results validate the analysis and demonstrate that the proposed system achieves superior BER performance compared with representative benchmarks, including existing RIS-aided DCSK-WPC, RM-DCSK-WPC, and bufferless RIS-RM-DCSK-WPC systems.