The efficacy of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided network for enhanced connectivity in skip zones is demonstrated through real-time video streaming. The demonstration is carried out with the help of National Instruments universal software radio peripheral (NI-USRP) devices integrated with an RIS prototype. The RIS prototype is designed and fabricated using a 16 × 10 metasurface operating at 5.3 GHz carrier frequency. Utilizing LabVIEW’s long-term evolution (LTE) application framework module, good connectivity between the transmitter and receiver in an otherwise skip zone is exhibited. Various modulation and coding schemes have been applied to the streamed data to observe the throughput, SINR, and constellation diagrams with respect to different positions of the receiver in the non-line of sight (NLOS) skip zone. The demonstration ratifies the potential of RIS system in practical applications related to future wireless communications.

Device to Device (D2D) communication is one of the key enhancement of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) Advanced standard which is a precursor to fifth generation (5G) cellular standard. D2D has gained considerable attention due to several drawbacks associated with the existing mobile networks such as multi-hop transmission, higher latency, high power consumption and significant path loss. In an underlay D2D communication, both cellular and D2D users coexist by simultaneously sharing the licensed cellular spectrum. However, the performance of an underlay D2D communication is limited by the amount of interference from the cellular user(CU) to the D2D user and vice versa. In this paper, we design and develop a test-bed to evaluate the real-world performance of the underlay D2D communication framework. We demonstrate the impact of interference caused by CU on D2D receiver's throughput at different cellular angles and position with respect to the base station (BS). The demonstration has been performed on National Instruments Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) RIO platform with LTE application framework module of LabVIEW communication system design suite as a supportive Application programming interface (API).