In a practical massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) system, the number of antennas at a base station (BS) is constrained by the space and cost factors, which limits the throughput gain promised by theoretical analysis. This paper thus studies the feasibility of adopting the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) to further improve the beamforming gain of the uplink communications in a massive MIMO system. Under such a novel system, the central question lies in whether the IRS is able to enhance the network throughput as expected, if the channel estimation overhead is taken into account. In this paper, we first show that the favorable propagation property for the conventional massive MIMO system without IRS, i.e., the channels of arbitrary two users are orthogonal, no longer holds for the IRS-assisted massive MIMO system, due to its special channel property that each IRS element reflects the signals from all the users to the BS via the same channel. As a result, the maximal-ratio combining (MRC) receive beamforming strategy leads to strong inter-user interference and thus even lower user rates than those of the massive MIMO system without IRS. To tackle this challenge, we propose a novel strategy for zero-forcing (ZF) beamforming design at the BS and reflection coefficients design at the IRS to efficiently null the inter-user interference. Under our proposed strategy, it is rigorously shown that even if the channel estimation overhead is considered, the IRS-assisted massive MIMO system can always achieve higher throughput compared to its counterpart without IRS, despite the fact that the favorable propagation property no longer holds.
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