No Arabic abstract
Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) can be beneficial to both information and energy transfer, due to the gains achieved by their multiple elements. In this work, we deal with the impact of spatial correlation between the IRS elements, in the context of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer. The performance is evaluated in terms of the average harvested energy and the outage probability for random and equal phase shifts. Closed-form analytical expressions for both metrics under spatial correlation are derived. Moreover, the optimal case is considered when the elements are uncorrelated and fully correlated. In the uncorrelated case, random and equal phase shifts provide the same performance. However, the performance of correlated elements attains significant gains when there are equal phase shifts. Finally, we show that correlation is always beneficial to energy transfer, whereas it is a degrading factor for information transfer under random and optimal configurations.
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted wireless communication is widely deemed a key technology for 6G systems. The main challenge in deploying an IRS-aided terahertz (THz) link, though, is the severe propagation losses at high frequency bands. Hence, a THz IRS is expected to consist of a massive number of reflecting elements to compensate for those losses. However, as the IRS size grows, the conventional far-field assumption starts becoming invalid and the spherical wavefront of the radiated waves must be taken into account. In this work, we focus on the near-field and analytically determine the IRS response in the Fresnel zone by leveraging electromagnetic theory. Specifically, we derive a novel expression for the path loss and beampattern of a holographic IRS, which is then used to model its discrete counterpart. Our analysis sheds light on the modeling aspects and beamfocusing capabilities of THz IRSs.
This paper studies the feasibility of deploying intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) in massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) systems to improve the performance of users in the service dead zone. To reduce the channel training overhead, we advocate a novel protocol for the uplink communication in the IRS-assisted massive MIMO systems. Under this protocol, the IRS reflection coefficients are optimized based on the channel covariance matrices, which are generally fixed for many coherence blocks, to boost the long-term performance. Then, given the IRS reflecting coefficients, the BS beamforming vectors are designed in each coherence block based on the effective channel of each user, which is the superposition of its direct and reflected user-IRS-BS channels, to improve the instantaneous performance. Since merely the user effective channels are estimated in each coherence block, the training overhead of this protocol is the same as that in the legacy wireless systems without IRSs. Moreover, in the asymptotic regime that the numbers of IRS elements and BS antennas both go to infinity with a fixed ratio, we manage to first characterize the minimum mean-squared error (MMSE) estimators of the user effective channels and then quantify the closed-form user achievable rates as functions of channel covariance matrices with channel training overhead and estimation error taken into account. Interestingly, it is shown that the properties of channel hardening and favorable propagation still hold for the user effective channels, and satisfactory user rates are thus achievable even if simple BS beamforming solutions, e.g., maximal-ratio combining, are employed. Finally, thanks to the rate characterization, we design a low-complexity algorithm to optimize the IRS reflection coefficients based on channel covariance matrices.
This paper considers an intelligent reflecting sur-face (IRS)-aided simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) network, where multiple users decode data and harvest energy from the transmitted signal of a transmit-ter. The proposed design framework exploits the cost-effective IRS to establish favorable communication environment to improve the fair energy efficient. In particular, we study the max-min energy efficiency (EE) of the system by jointly designing the transmit information and energy beamforming at the base station (BS), phase shifts at the IRS, as well as the power splitting (PS) ratio at all users subject to the minimum rate, minimum harvested energy, and transmit power constraints. The formulated problem is non-convex and thus challenging to be solved. We propose two algorithms namely penalty-based and inner approximation (IA)-based to handle the non-convexity of the optimization problem. As such, we divide the original problem into two sub-problems and apply the alternating optimization (AO) algorithm for both proposed algorithms to handle it iteratively. In particular, in the penalty-based algorithm for the first sub-problem, the semi-definite relaxation (SDR) technique, difference of convex functions (DC) programming, majorization-minimization (MM) approach, and fractional programming theory are exploited to transform the non-convex optimization problem into a convex form that can be addressed efficiently. For the second sub-problem, a penalty-based approach is proposed to handle the optimization on the phase shifts introduced by the IRS with the proposed algorithms. For the IA-based method, we optimize jointly beamforming vectors and phase shifts while the PS ratio is solved optimally in the first sub-problem...
We introduce a novel system setup where a backscatter device operates in the presence of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). In particular, we study the bistatic backscatter communication (BackCom) system assisted by an IRS. The phase shifts at the IRS are optimized jointly with the transmit beamforming vector of the carrier emitter to minimize the transmit power consumption at the carrier emitter whilst guaranteeing a required BackCom performance. The unique channel characteristics arising from multiple reflections at the IRS render the optimization problem highly non-convex. Therefore, we jointly utilize the minorization-maximization algorithm and the semidefinite relaxation technique to present an approximate solution for the optimal IRS phase shift design. We also extend our analytical results to the monostatic BackCom system. Numerical results indicate that the introduction of the IRS brings about considerable reductions in transmit power, even with moderate IRS sizes, which can be translated to range increases over the non-IRS-assisted BackCom system.
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.