  The widespread adoption of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs) in
future practical wireless systems is critically dependent on the integration of
the RIS into higher-layer protocols beyond the physical (PHY) one, an issue
that has received minimal attention in the research literature. In light of
this, we consider a classical random access (RA) problem, where uncoordinated
users' equipment (UEs) transmit sporadically to an access point (AP).
Differently from previous works, we ponder how a RIS can be integrated into the
design of new medium access control (MAC) layer protocols to solve such a
problem. We consider that the AP is able to control a RIS to change how its
reflective elements are configured, namely, the RIS configurations. Thus, the
RIS can be opportunistically controlled to favor the transmission of some of
the UEs without the need to explicitly perform channel estimation (CHEST). We
embrace this observation and propose a RIS-assisted RA protocol comprised of
two modules: Channel Oracle and Access. During channel oracle, the UEs learn
how the RIS configurations affect their channel conditions. During the access,
the UEs tailor their access policies using the channel oracle knowledge. Our
proposed RIS-assisted protocol is able to increase the expected throughput by
approximately 60% in comparison to the slotted ALOHA (S-ALOHA) protocol.
