Towards Smart and Reconfigurable Environment: Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Wireless Network

By Qingqing Wu, Rui Zhang. IEEE Communications Magazine, 2019

3,827 citations recorded by the source corpus.

IRS is a new and revolutionizing technology that is able to significantly improve the performance of wireless communication networks, by smartly reconfiguring the wireless propagation environment with the use of massive low-cost passive reflecting elements integrated on a planar surface. Specifically, different elements of an IRS can independently reflect the incident signal by controlling its amplitude and/or phase and thereby collaboratively achieve fine-grained 3D passive beamforming for directional signal enhancement or nulling. In this article, we first provide an overview of the IRS technology, including its main applications in wireless communication, competitive advantages over existing technologies, hardware architecture as well as the corresponding new signal model. We then address the key challenges in designing and implementing the new IRS-aided hybrid (with both active and passive components) wireless network, as compared to the traditional network comprising active components only. Finally, numerical results are provided to show the great performance enhancement with the use of IRS in typical wireless networks.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/36e3111b1b2e86e17ed38245d65d61756f5e35af

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Citations in the corpus

Deep Denoising Neural Network Assisted Compressive Channel Estimation for mmWave Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (2020, background): “3005402 beyond 5 G/6 G wireless communication networks to substantially improve the link quality and reduce the blockage probability [1], [2].”
Smart Radio Environments Empowered by Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: How it Works, State of Research, and Road Ahead (2020, background): “During the last two years, several survey and tutorial papers on the application of RISs to the design of wireless networks have been published [26], [27], [28], [45], [46], [47], [48], [49], [50], [51], [52], [53], [54], [55].”
Robust and Secure Wireless Communications via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (2019, background): “Among various types of metasurfaces, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs), a kind of passive metasurface, are particularly appealing and have been recently exploited for wireless communication system design [9]–[13].”
Joint Active and Passive Beamforming Optimization for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted SWIPT Under QoS Constraints (2019, methodology): “Although the massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology is able to improve the WPT efficiency considerably by leveraging the large array/beamforming gain at the WPT/SWIPT transmitter, the required high complexity, high energy consumption, and high hardware cost are still the main roadb”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Secrecy Communication: Is Artificial Noise Helpful or Not? (2019, methodology): “By applying the various channel acquisition methods discussed in [1] and [9], we assume that the channel state information (CSI) of all channels including Eves’ channels 1 is perfectly known for the joint design of transmit/reﬂect beamforming and jamming.”
User-Centric Cell-Free Massive MIMO Networks: A Survey of Opportunities, Challenges and Solutions (2021, background): “The DCNN seems to succeed in mapping the large-scale fading to the allocated power coefﬁcients.”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Three Myths and Two Critical Questions (2020, methodology): “It has been claimed that these are asymptotic scaling laws [4], which means that the SNR with the RIS grows unboundedly with N at the order of N2 and eventually becomes larger than with the transmitter array.”
Exploiting Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces in NOMA Networks: Joint Beamforming Optimization (2019, background): “An IRS is a planar array comprising a large number of low cost passive reflecting elements, which can passively reflect the incident electromagnetic wave and simultaneously change its amplitude and phase shift [4].”
Communication-Efficient Edge AI: Algorithms and Systems (2020, background): “A new technology named intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) [213] emerges as a cost-effective approach to enhance the spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency of wireless communication networks, which is promising in facilitating communication-efficient edge inference [214].”
Intelligent Reflecting Surface Versus Decode-and-Forward: How Large Surfaces are Needed to Beat Relaying? (2019, background): “Reflectarrays with real-time reconfigurable phase, amplitude, and polarization properties have recently gained interest in mobile communications, under names such as intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) [3], [4] and software-controlled metasurfaces [5]–[7].”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Principles and Opportunities (2020, background): “RIS is installed on the facade of a building for enhancing the wireless services [3], [132].”
Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces for Efficient Holographic MIMO Communications in 6G (2023, background): “smart reconfigurable environments [7], [8], [9], [10], [11].”