Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technology for enhancing wireless communication systems. It adaptively configures massive passive reflecting elements to control wireless channel in a desirable way. Due to hardware characteristics and deploying environments, an IRS may be subject to reflecting element blockages and failures, and hence developing diagnostic techniques is of great significance to system monitoring and maintenance. In this paper, we develop diagnostic techniques for IRS systems to locate faulty reflecting elements and retrieve failure parameters. Three cases of channel state information (CSI) availability are considered. In the first case where full CSI is available, a compressed sensing based diagnostic technique is proposed, which significantly reduces the required number of measurements. In the second case where only partial CSI is available, we jointly exploit the sparsity of the millimeter-wave channel and the failure, and adopt compressed sparse and low-rank matrix recovery algorithm to decouple channel and failure. In the third case where no CSI is available, a novel atomic norm is introduced as the sparsity-inducing norm of the cascaded channel, and the diagnosis problem is formulated as a joint sparse recovery problem. Finally, the proposed diagnostic techniques are validated through numerical simulations.
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