It is known that the capacity of the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided cellular network can be effectively improved by reflecting the incident signals from the transmitter in a low-cost passive reflecting way. In this paper, we study the adoption of an IRS for downlink multi-user communication from a multi-antenna base station (BS). Nevertheless, in the actual network operation, the IRS operator can be selfish or have its own objectives due to competing/limited resources as well as deployment/maintenance cost. Therefore, in this paper, we develop a Stackelbeg game model to analyze the interaction between the BS and the IRS operator. Specifically, different from the existing studies on IRS that merely focus on tuning the reflection coefficient of all the reflection elements, we consider the reflection resource (elements) management, which can be realized via trigger module selection under our proposed IRS architecture that all the reflection elements are partially controlled by independent switches of controller. A Stackelberg game-based alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) is proposed to jointly optimize the transmit beamforming at the BS and the passive beamforming of the triggered reflection modules. Numerical examples are presented to verify the proposed studies. It is shown that the proposed scheme is effective in the utilities of both the BS and IRS.
In this paper, we derive the uplink achievable rate expression of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided millimeter-wave (mmWave) systems, taking into account the phase noise at IRS and the quantization error at base stations (BSs). We show that the performance is limited only by the resolution of analog-digital converters (ADCs) at BSs when the number of IRS reflectors grows without bound. On the other hand, if BSs have ideal ADCs, the performance loss caused by IRS phase noise is a constant. Finally, our results validate the feasibility of using low-precision hardware at the IRS when BSs…
We investigate the use of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in a millimeter-wave (mmWave) vehicular communication network. An intelligent reflecting surface consists of passive elements, which can reflect the incoming signals with adjustable phase shifts. By properly tuning the phase shifts we can improve link performance. This is known as phase optimization or passive beamforming. We consider the problem of rate maximization in the uplink, which utilizes an IRS. However, using an IRS brings more challenges in terms of channel estimation. We propose two schemes to reduce the channel esti…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a revolutionizing solution to enhance wireless communications by intelligently changing the propagation environment. Prior studies on IRS are based on an ideal reflection model with a constant amplitude and a variable phase shift. However, it is difficult and unrealistic to implement an IRS satisfying such ideal reflection model in practical applications. In this letter, we aim to investigate the phase-amplitude-frequency relationship of the reflected signals and propose a practical model of reflection coefficient for an IRS-aided wideband sy…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is envisioned as a promising solution for controlling radio propagation environments in future wireless systems. In this paper, we propose a distributed intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted multi-user millimeter wave (mmWave) system, where IRSs are exploited to enhance the mmWave signal coverage when direct links between base station and users are unavailable. First, a joint active and passive beamforming problem is established for weighted sum-rate maximization. Then, an alternating iterative algorithm with closed-form expressions is proposed to t…
This paper investigates an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided cooperative communication network, where the IRS exploits large reflecting elements to proactively steer the incident radio-frequency wave towards destination terminals (DTs). As the number of reflecting elements increases, the reflection resource allocation (RRA) will become urgently needed in this context, which is due to the non-ignorable energy consumption. The goal of this paper, therefore, is to realize the RRA besides the active-passive beamforming design, where RRA is based on the introduced modular IRS architecture.…
In this letter, secure beamforming in a multiple intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs)-aided millimeter-wave (mmWave) system is investigated. In this system, the secrecy rate is maximized by controlling the on-off status of each IRS as well as optimizing the phase shift matrix of the IRSs. This problem is posed as a joint optimization problem of transmit beamforming and IRS control, whose goal is to maximize the secrecy rate under the total transmission power and unit-modulus constraints. The problem is difficult to solve optimally due to the nonconvexity of constraint conditions and coupled …
This letter studies a cloud radio access network (C-RAN) with multiple intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) deployed between users and remote radio heads (RRH). Specifically, we consider the uplink transmission where each RRH quantizes the received signals from the users by either point-to-point compression or Wyner-Ziv compression and then transmits the quantization bits to the BBU pool through capacity limited fronthhual links. To maximize the uplink sum rate, we jointly optimize the passive beamformers of IRSs and the quantization noise covariance matrices of fronthoul compression. An join…
Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) are two promising techniques for providing enhanced wireless communication capability and sustainable energy supply to energy-constrained wireless devices. Moreover, the combination of the IRS and the SWIPT can create the "one plus one greater than two" effect. However, due to the broadcast nature of wireless media, the IRS-aided SWIPT systems are vulnerable to eavesdropping. In this paper, we study the security issue of the IRS-aided SWIPT systems. The objective is to maximize the secrecy rat…
Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are envisioned to provide reconfigurable wireless environments for future communication networks. In this paper, both downlink and uplink IRS-aided non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and orthogonal multiple access (OMA) networks are studied, in which an IRS is deployed to enhance the coverage by assisting a cell-edge user device (UD) to communicate with the base station (BS). To characterize system performance, new channel statistics of the BS-IRS-UD link with Nakagami-$m$ fading are investigated. For each scenario, the closed-form expressions for the …
In this paper, the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication system is studied, where the UAV is deployed to serve the user equipment (UE) with the assistance of multiple IRSs mounted on several buildings to enhance the communication quality between UAV and UE. We aim to maximize the energy efficiency of the system, including the data rate of UE and the energy consumption of UAV via jointly optimizing the UAV's trajectory and the phase shifts of reflecting elements of IRS, when the UE moves and the selection of IRSs is considered for the energy savi…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising and revolutionizing technology for future wireless networks. Most existing IRS studies focus on simple cooperative systems which usually have a single frequency band. In realistic non-cooperative multi-band networks, however, the existing IRS designs may be not applicable or have severe performance degradation. Thus, in the complex network environment, it is more rational to consider IRSs as public resources to be dynamically allocated to appropriate users. In this paper, we first introduce the auction theory to tackle the resourc…
Maneuvering target sensing will be an important service of future vehicular networks, where precise velocity estimation is one of the core tasks. To this end, the recently proposed integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) provides a promising platform for achieving accurate velocity estimation. However, with one mono-static ISAC base station (BS), only the radial projection of the true velocity can be estimated, which causes serious estimation error. In this paper, we investigate the estimation of the true velocity of a maneuvering target with the assistance of an intelligent reflecting su…
In this paper, we study an intelligent omni-surface (IOS)-assisted downlink communication system, where the link quality of a mobile user (MU) can be improved with a proper IOS phase shift design. Unlike the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in most existing works that only forwards the signals in a reflective way, the IOS is capable to forward the received signals to the MU in either a reflective or a transmissive manner, thereby enhancing the wireless coverage. We formulate an IOS phase shift optimization problem to maximize the downlink spectral efficiency (SE) of the MU. The optimal pha…
In this paper, we focus on the sum-rate optimization in a multi-user millimeter-wave (mmWave) system with distributed intelligent reflecting surfaces (D-IRSs), where a base station (BS) communicates with users via multiple IRSs. The BS transmit beamforming, IRS switch vector, and phase shifts of the IRS are jointly optimized to maximize the sum-rate under minimum user rate, unit-modulus, and transmit power constraints. To solve the resulting non-convex optimization problem, we develop an efficient alternating optimization (AO) algorithm. Specifically, the non-convex problem is converted into t…
An intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is invoked for enhancing the energy harvesting performance of a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) aided system. Specifically, an IRS-assisted SWIPT system is considered, where a multi-antenna aided base station (BS) communicates with several multi-antenna assisted information receivers (IRs), while guaranteeing the energy harvesting requirement of the energy receivers (ERs). To maximize the weighted sum rate (WSR) of IRs, the transmit precoding (TPC) matrices of the BS and passive phase shift matrix of the IRS should be jointly…
In this paper, we consider the weighted sum-power minimization under quality-of-service (QoS) constraints in the multi-user multi-input-single-output (MISO) uplink wireless network assisted by intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). We perform a comprehensive investigation on various aspects of this problem. First, when users have sufficient transmit powers, we present a new sufficient condition guaranteeing arbitrary information rate constraints. This result strengthens the feasibility condition in existing literature. Then, we design novel penalty dual decomposition (PDD) based and nonlinear e…
In this letter, we consider a multicast system where a single-antenna transmitter sends a common message to multiple single-antenna users, aided by an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) equipped with $N$ passive reflecting elements. Prior works on IRS have mostly assumed the availability of channel state information (CSI) for designing its passive beamforming. However, the acquisition of CSI requires substantial training overhead that increases with $N$. In contrast, we propose in this letter a novel \emph{random passive beamforming} scheme, where the IRS performs independent random reflecti…
In this paper, we consider the weighted sum-power minimization under quality-of-service (QoS) constraints in the multi-user multi-input-single-output (MISO) uplink wireless network assisted by intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). We perform a comprehensive investigation on various aspects of this problem. First, when users have sufficient transmit powers, we present a new sufficient condition guaranteeing arbitrary information rate constraints. This result strengthens the feasibility condition in existing literature. Then, we design novel penalty dual decomposition (PDD) based and nonlinear e…
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have emerged as a cost- and energy-efficient technology that can customize and program the physical propagation environment by reflecting radio waves in preferred directions. However, the purely passive reflection of RISs not only limits the end-to-end channel beamforming gains, but also hinders the acquisition of accurate channel state information for the phase control at RISs. In this paper, we provide an overview of a hybrid relay-reflecting intelligent surface (HR-RIS) architecture, in which only a few elements are active and connected to power am…
Perfect channel state information (CSI) is challenging to obtain due to the limited signal processing capability at the intelligent reflection surface (IRS). In this paper, we study the worst-case robust beamforming design for an IRS-aided multiuser multiple-input single-output (MU-MISO) system under the assumption of imperfect CSI. We aim for minimizing the transmit power while ensuring that the achievable rate of each user meets the quality of service (QoS) requirement for all possible channel error realizations. With unit-modulus and rate constraints, this problem is non-convex. The imperfe…
Mobile edge computing (MEC) is envisioned as a promising technique to support computation-intensive and timecritical applications in future Internet of Things (IoT) era. However, the uplink transmission performance will be highly impacted by the hostile wireless channel, the low bandwidth, and the low transmission power of IoT devices. Recently, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has drawn much attention because of its capability to control the wireless environments so as to enhance the spectrum and energy efficiencies of wireless communications. In this paper, we consider an IRS-aided multi…
The intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) technology has recently attracted a lot of interest in wireless communications research. An IRS consists of passive reflective elements capable of tuning the phase, amplitude, frequency and polarization of the impinging waveforms. Given such desirable properties, the wireless channel characteristics can be controlled and optimized for specific signal design and processing needs -- thus promising significant potential in radar applications. In this paper, we establish the theoretical foundations for introducing IRS into a radar system and study the poten…
The growing demand for virtual reality (VR) applications requires wireless systems to provide a high transmission rate to support 360-degree video streaming to multiple users simultaneously. In this paper, we propose an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided rate-splitting (RS) VR streaming system. In the proposed system, RS facilitates the exploitation of the shared interests of the users in VR streaming, and IRS creates additional propagation channels to support the transmission of high-resolution 360-degree videos. IRS also enhances the capability to mitigate the performance bottleneck …
This paper studies the estimation of cascaded channels in passive intelligent reflective surface (IRS)- aided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems employing hybrid precoders and combiners. We propose a low-complexity solution that estimates the channel parameters progressively. The angles of departure (AoDs) and angles of arrival (AoAs) at the transmitter and receiver, respectively, are first estimated using inductive matrix completion (IMC) followed by root-MUSIC based super-resolution spectrum estimation. Forward-backward spatial smoothing (FBSS) is applied to address the coherence …
In this paper, we study the performance of wideband terahertz (THz) communications assisted by an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). Specifically, we first introduce a generalized channel model that is suitable for electrically large THz IRSs operating in the near-field. Unlike prior works, our channel model takes into account the spherical wavefront of the emitted electromagnetic waves and the spatial-wideband effect. We next show that conventional frequency-flat beamfocusing significantly reduces the power gain due to beam squint, and hence is highly suboptimal. More importantly, we analy…
Computation off-loading in mobile edge computing (MEC) systems constitutes an efficient paradigm of supporting resource-intensive applications on mobile devices. However, the benefit of MEC cannot be fully exploited, when the communications link used for off-loading computational tasks is hostile. Fortunately, the propagation-induced impairments may be mitigated by intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS), which are capable of enhancing both the spectral- and energy-efficiency. Specifically, an IRS comprises an IRS controller and a large number of passive reflecting elements, each of which may im…
Reducing computational complexity is crucial in optimizing the phase shifts of Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) systems since IRS-assisted communication systems are generally deployed with a large number of reflecting elements (REs). This letter proposes a low-complexity algorithm, designated as Dimension-wise Sinusoidal Maximization (DSM), to obtain the optimal IRS phase shifts that maximize the sum capacity of a MIMO network. The algorithm exploits the fact that the objective function for the optimization problem is sinusoidal w.r.t. the phase shift of each RE. The numerical results show…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a new promising technology that is able to manipulate the wireless propagation channel via smart and controllable signal reflection. In this paper, we investigate the capacity region of a multiple access channel (MAC) with two users sending independent messages to an access point (AP), aided by $M$ IRS reflecting elements. We consider two practical IRS deployment strategies that lead to different user-AP effective channels, namely, the distributed deployment where the $M$ reflecting elements form two IRSs, each deployed in the vicinity of one user, versu…
Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is recognized as a promising technology with great potential in saving hardware and spectrum resources, since it simultaneously realizes radar detection and user communication functions in the fully-shared platform. Employing reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) in ISAC systems is able to provide a virtual line-of-sight (LoS) path to conquer blockage problem as well as introduce new degrees of freedom (DoFs) to further enhance system performance. Nevertheless, the multiplicative fading effect of passive RIS limits its applications in the absence …
Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞瓦特大学）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Universitas Kristen Indonesia Paulus（印度尼西亚保罗克里斯蒂安大学）
This paper considers machine learning for physical layer security design for communication in a challenging wireless environment. The radio environment is assumed to be programmable with the aid of a meta material-based intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) allowing customisable path loss, multi-path fading and interference effects. In particular, the fine-grained reflections from the IRS elements are exploited to create channel advantage for maximizing the secrecy rate at a legitimate receiver. A deep learning (DL) technique has been developed to tune the reflections of the IRS elements in rea…
This paper investigates the achievable rate region of the multiple-input single-output (MISO) interference channel aided by intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). We exploit the the additional design degree of freedom provided by the coordinated IRSs to enhance the desired signal and suppress interference so as to enlarge the achievable rate region of the interference channel. To this end, we jointly optimize the active transmit beamforming at the transmitters and passive reflective beamforming at the IRSs, subject to the constant modulus constraints of reflective beamforming vectors. To addr…
Wireless powered mobile edge computing (WP-MEC) has been recognized as a promising technique to provide both enhanced computational capability and sustainable energy supply to massive low-power wireless devices. However, its energy consumption becomes substantial, when the transmission link used for wireless energy transfer (WET) and for computation offloading is hostile. To mitigate this hindrance, we propose to employ the emerging technique of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in WP-MEC systems, which is capable of providing an additional link both for WET and for computation offloading. …
Integrating the reconfigurable intelligent surface in a cell-free (RIS-CF) network is an effective solution to improve the capacity and coverage of future wireless systems with low cost and power consumption. The reflecting coefficients of RISs can be programmed to enhance signals received at users. This letter addresses a joint design of transmit beamformers at access points and reflecting coefficients at RISs to maximize the energy efficiency (EE) of RIS-CF networks, taking into account the limited backhaul capacity constraints. Due to a very computationally challenging nonconvex problem, we…
This paper proposes a novel location information aided multiple intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) systems. Assuming imperfect user location information, the effective angles from the IRS to the users are estimated, which is then used to design the transmit beam and IRS beam. Furthermore, closed-form expressions for the achievable rate are derived. The analytical findings indicate that the achievable rate can be improved by increasing the number of base station (BS) antennas or reflecting elements. Specifically, a power gain of order $N M^2$ is achieved, where $N$ is the antenna number and $…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is an emerging technology that is able to significantly improve the performance of wireless communications, by smartly tuning signal reflections at a large number of passive reflecting elements. On the other hand, with ubiquitous wireless devices and ambient radio-frequency signals, wireless sensing has become a promising new application for the next-generation/6G wireless networks. By synergizing low-cost IRS and fertile wireless sensing applications, this article proposes a new IRS-aided sensing paradigm for enhancing the performance of wireless sensing c…
As an excellent aided communication tool, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) can make a significant rate enhancement and coverage extension. In this paper, we present an investigation on beamforming in an IRS-aided directional modulation (DM) network. To fully explore the advantages of IRS, two beamforming methods with enhanced secrecy rate (SR) performance are proposed. The first method of maximizing secrecy rate (Max-SR) alternately optimizes confidential message (CM) beamforming vector, artificial noise (AN) beamforming vector and phase shift matrix. The first optimization vector is direc…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has the potential to significantly enhance the network performance by reconfiguring the wireless propagation environments. It is however difficult to obtain the accurate downlink channel state information (CSI) for efficient beamforming design in IRS-aided wireless networks. In this article, we consider an IRS-aided downlink multiple-input single-output (MISO) network, where the base station (BS) is not required to know the underlying channel distribution. We formulate an outage probability minimization problem by jointly optimizing the beamforming vector a…
In this letter, we study a rate-splitting multiple access (RSMA)-based intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided multi-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) secure communication system with a potential eavesdropper (Eve). Aiming to maximize the minimum secrecy rate (SR) among all the legitimate users (LUs), a design problem for jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming with artificial noise (AN), the IRS beamforming, and the secrecy common rate allocation is formulated. Since the design problem is highly non-convex with coupled optimization variables, we develop a computationally efficie…
As communication systems that employ millimeter wave (mmWave) frequency bands must use large antenna arrays to overcome the severe propagation loss of mmWave signals, hybrid beamforming has been considered as an integral component of mmWave communications. Recently, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been proposed as an innovative technology that can significantly improve the performance of mmWave communication systems through the use of low-cost passive reflecting elements. In this paper, we study IRS-aided mmWave multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems with hybrid beamforming arc…
This paper considers an active intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided wireless powered communication network (WPCN), where devices first harvest energy and then transmit information to a hybrid access point (HAP). Different from the existing works on passive IRS-aided WPCNs, this is the first work that introduces the active IRS in WPCNs. To guarantee fairness, the problem is formulated as an amplifying power-limited weighted sum throughput (WST) maximization problem, which is solved by successive convex approximation technique and fractional programming alternatively. To balance the perfor…
Integrating intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) and Rate-Splitting Multiple Access (RSMA) is an effective solution to improve the spectral/energy efficiency in next-generation (beyond 5G (B5G) and 6G) wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate a rate-splitting (RS)-based transmission technique for an IRS-aided communication network involving both near and cell-edge users. In particular, we derive a new architecture called IRS-RS that leverages the interplay between RS and IRS, with an aim to maximize the weighted sum-rate (WSR) of users by selecting the reflecting coefficients at the IR…
In this paper, the novel simultaneously transmitting and reflecting (STAR) reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), which enables full-space coverage on users located on both sides of the surface, is investigated in the multi-user mobile edge computing (MEC) system. A computation rate maximization problem is formulated via the joint design of the STAR-RIS phase shifts, reflection and transmission amplitude coefficients, the receive beamforming vectors at the access point, and the users' energy partition strategies for local computing and offloading. Two operating protocols of STAR-RIS, namely…
Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) improve both the bandwidth and energy efficiency of wideband communication systems by using low-cost passive elements for reflecting the impinging signals with adjustable phase shifts. To realize the full potential of IRS-aided systems, having accurate channel state information (CSI) is indispensable, but it is challenging to acquire, since these passive devices cannot carry out transmit/receive signal processing. The existing channel estimation methods conceived for wideband IRS-aided communication systems only consider the channel's frequency selectivit…
This paper considers a two-user downlink transmission in intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided network over fading channels. Particularly, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) and two orthogonal multiple access (OMA) schemes, namely, time division multiple access (TDMA) and frequency division multiple access (FDMA), are studied. The objective is to maximize the system average sum rate for the delay-tolerant transmission. We propose two adjustment schemes, namely, dynamic phase adjustment and one-time phase adjustment. The power budget, minimum average data rate, and discrete unit modulus…
This paper proposes a novel framework of resource allocation in intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided multi-cell non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks, where a sum-rate maximization problem is formulated. To address this challenging mixed-integer non-linear problem, we decompose it into an optimization problem (P1) with continuous variables and a matching problem (P2) with integer variables. For the non-convex optimization problem (P1), iterative algorithms are proposed for allocating transmit power, designing reflection matrix, and determining decoding order by invoking relaxati…
The performance of a device-to-device (D2D) underlay communication system is limited by the co-channel interference between cellular users (CUs) and D2D devices. To address this challenge, an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided D2D underlay system is studied in this paper. A two-timescale optimization scheme is proposed to reduce the required channel training and feedback overhead, where transmit beamforming at the base station (BS) and power control at the D2D transmitter are adapted to instantaneous effective channel state information (CSI); and the IRS phase shifts are adapted to slo…
