A Survey on Channel Estimation and Practical Passive Beamforming Design for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Wireless Communications

By Beixiong Zheng, Changsheng You, Weidong Mei, Rui Zhang. IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials, 2021

574 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a key enabling technology to realize smart and reconfigurable radio environment for wireless communications, by digitally controlling the signal reflection via a large number of passive reflecting elements in real time. Different from conventional wireless communication techniques that only adapt to but have no or limited control over dynamic wireless channels, IRS provides a new and cost-effective means to combat the wireless channel impairments in a proactive manner. However, despite its great potential, IRS faces new and unique challenges in its efficient integration into wireless communication systems, especially its channel estimation and passive beamforming design under various practical hardware constraints. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on the up-to-date research in IRS-aided wireless communications, with an emphasis on the promising solutions to tackle practical design issues. Furthermore, we discuss new and emerging IRS architectures and applications as well as their practical design problems to motivate future research.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Genetics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/665f3b89ff280aa07abbd29286b5cba5e9697eb6

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Aerospace Engineering

1. Shuguang Cui
2. David Gesbert
3. Qian Liu
4. Rang Liu
5. Ming Li
6. Yang Liu
7. Qing-He Wu
8. Rui Zhang

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

1. Shuguang Cui
2. Rui Zhang
3. David Gesbert
4. Qian Liu
5. Rang Liu
6. Ming Li
7. Yang Liu
8. Qing-He Wu

In Genetics

1. Rui Zhang
2. Qingqing Wu

Citations in the corpus

• An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for RIS/IRS-Aided Wireless Systems (2021, unknown): “In addition, several tutorial/overview papers have summarized recent developments in this area, including the technical challenges [30], operation principles [31], transmission design and applications [32], electromagnetic modeling [33], practical design issues [34] and channel estimation [35].”
• Joint Transmit Waveform and Passive Beamforming Design for RIS-Aided DFRC Systems (2021, background): “In addition, channel state information (CSI) acquisition, which is a crucial and challenging task in RIS-aided wireless systems, has been intensively investigated and comprehensively reviewed in [26], [27].”
• A Tutorial on Environment-Aware Communications via Channel Knowledge Map for 6G (2023, methodology): “Nevertheless, the resulting map can provide accurate channel inference even when device orientation varies.”