Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Wireless Communications: A Tutorial

By Qingqing Wu, Shuowen Zhang, Beixiong Zheng, Changsheng You, Rui Zhang. IEEE Transactions on Communications, 2020

2,761 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is an enabling technology to engineer the radio signal propagation in wireless networks. By smartly tuning the signal reflection via a large number of low-cost passive reflecting elements, IRS is capable of dynamically altering wireless channels to enhance the communication performance. It is thus expected that the new IRS-aided hybrid wireless network comprising both active and passive components will be highly promising to achieve a sustainable capacity growth cost-effectively in the future. Despite its great potential, IRS faces new challenges to be efficiently integrated into wireless networks, such as reflection optimization, channel estimation, and deployment from communication design perspectives. In this paper, we provide a tutorial overview of IRS-aided wireless communications to address the above issues, and elaborate its reflection and channel models, hardware architecture and practical constraints, as well as various appealing applications in wireless networks. Moreover, we highlight important directions worthy of further investigation in future work.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/905d6ac39e4021743f46ec0197c9a19180523e43

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Citations in the corpus

Flexible-Antenna Systems: A Pinching-Antenna Perspective (2024, neutral): “Finally, the case with multiple pinching antennas and multiple waveguides is studied, which resembles a classical multiple-input single-output (MISO) interference channel.”
Stacked Intelligent Metasurfaces for Efficient Holographic MIMO Communications in 6G (2023, neutral): “[15], [42], there are still stumbling blocks in the way of practical deployments of RIS.”
Power Scaling Laws and Near-Field Behaviors of Massive MIMO and Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (2020, background): “The concept of realtime controllable metasurfaces has recently received much attention in the communications society and is called intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) [15], [16], software-controlled metasurface [17], [18], and reconfigurable intelligent surface [19]–[21].”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: A signal processing perspective with wireless applications (2021, neutral): “It is meant as a complement to recent surveys of electromagnetic and hardware aspects [4], [7], [11], acoustics [12], communication theory [13], and localization [8].”
An Overview of Signal Processing Techniques for RIS/IRS-Aided Wireless Systems (2021, neutral): “The locations in metre of the BS and MU are q = [0 , 0 , 40] T and p = [90 , 30 , 0] T , respectively, and the locations of three RISs are s1 = [60 , 45 , 15] T , s2 = [50 , 50 , 5] T and s3 = [40 , 20 , 10] T .”
Simultaneously Transmitting And Reflecting (STAR) RIS Aided Wireless Communications (2021, background): “Different from conventional reflecting-only RISs, whose optimal deployment strategy requires only to assign either the users or the BSs to its local reflection region [42, 43], the deployment locations and orientations of STAR-RISs have to be further optimized to balance the numbers users on both si”
Modeling and Architecture Design of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces Using Scattering Parameter Network Analysis (2020, background): “R ECONFIGURABLE intelligent surfaces (RISs), also known as intelligent reﬂecting surfaces, have gained popularity as a revolutionary technology for achieving spectrum efﬁcient, energy efﬁcient, and cost effective wireless communication [1], [2], [3].”
A Comprehensive Overview on 5G-and-Beyond Networks With UAVs: From Communications to Sensing and Intelligence (2020, background): “The BS-UIRS horizontal distance is d m and the UIRS’s altitude is H m.”
Evolution of NOMA Toward Next Generation Multiple Access (NGMA) for 6G (2021, neutral): “Motivated by the development of metasurfaces, RISs [99], also known as intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) [100],”
RIS-Aided Wireless Communications: Prototyping, Adaptive Beamforming, and Indoor/Outdoor Field Trials (2021, methodology): “This property has not been taken into consideration in the canonical system model used by the communication and signal processing literature [9], [12].”
Edge Artificial Intelligence for 6G: Vision, Enabling Technologies, and Applications (2021, background): “directional signal enhancement or nulling, and thus altering the propagation of the reflected signals [49], [207], [208].”
A Tutorial on Environment-Aware Communications via Channel Knowledge Map for 6G (2023, background): “The above discussions reveal that for both pilot-based channel training and beam sweeping methods, from the link perspective, the required training overhead increases with the channel dimensions.”
Double-IRS Assisted Multi-User MIMO: Cooperative Passive Beamforming Design (2020, methodology): “AS a promising technology for achieving smart and reconfigurable wireless communication environment costeffectively, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has recently received rapidly increasing attention from both academic and industry communities [1]–[4].”
Joint Transmit Waveform and Passive Beamforming Design for RIS-Aided DFRC Systems (2021, background): “RIS, also called intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) [7] or large intelligent surface (LIS) [8], is a kind of meta-surface consisting of an array of passive reflecting elements, each of which can adjust the phase-shift, amplitude, frequency and polarization of the the incident signals.”
Integrated Sensing and Communications: Toward Dual-Functional Wireless Networks for 6G and Beyond (2021, background): “Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), also known as intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) and large intelligent surface (LIS), is a new type of passive metamaterial device consisting of a large number of reflecting elements whose reflecting amplitudes and phases can be independently controlled to”
Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces: Principles and Opportunities (2020, background): “There are some short magazine papers [3], [10], [28], [29], surveys and tutorials [6], [7], [30]– [33] in the literature that introduced RISs and their variants, but the focus of these papers is different from our work.”
Security and Privacy for 6G: A Survey on Prospective Technologies and Challenges (2021, background): “Large Intelligent Surface (LIS), the other name of Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS), is a revolutionary technology for 5G beyond and 6G that uses a planar array of low-cost reflecting elements to dynamically tune the transmission signal phase shift for enhancing communication performance[116].”
Communicating With Extremely Large-Scale Array/Surface: Unified Modeling and Performance Analysis (2021, neutral): “…have attracted fast-growing interest recently, such as extremely large-scale multiple-input multiple-output (XL-MIMO) communication [6], [7], Terahertz communication [8], [9], intelligent reﬂecting surface (IRS) or reconﬁgurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted communications [10]–[14].”