Efficient Channel Estimation for Double-IRS Aided Multi-User MIMO System
Beixiong Zheng, Changsheng You, Rui Zhang
备注：
Early access in IEEE TCOM(https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9373363). Efficient channel estimation scheme for the double-IRS assisted uplink multi-user MIMO communication system (arXiv:2008.13701) with the "lowest training overhead". Conference version (arXiv:2010.06155)
To achieve the more significant passive beamforming gain in the double-intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided system over the conventional single-IRS counterpart, channel state information (CSI) is indispensable in practice but also more challenging to acquire, due to the presence of not only the single- but also double-reflection links that are intricately coupled and also entail more channel coefficients for estimation. In this paper, we propose a new and efficient channel estimation scheme for the double-IRS aided multi-user multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system to resolve the cascaded CSI of both its single- and double-reflection links. First, for the single-user case, the single- and double-reflection channels are efficiently estimated at the multi-antenna base station (BS) with both the IRSs turned ON (for maximal signal reflection), by exploiting the fact that their cascaded channel coefficients are scaled versions of their superimposed lower-dimensional CSI. Then, the proposed channel estimation scheme is extended to the multi-user case, where given an arbitrary user's cascaded channel (estimated as in the single-user case), the other users' cascaded channels can also be expressed as lower-dimensional scaled versions of it and thus efficiently estimated at the BS. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed channel estimation scheme and joint training reflection design for double IRSs, as compared to various benchmark schemes.
Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) enable multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmitters to modify the communication channels between the transmitters and receivers. In the presence of eavesdropping terminals, this degree of freedom can be used to effectively suppress the information leakage towards such malicious terminals. This leads to significant potential secrecy gains in IRS-aided MIMO systems. This work exploits these gains via a tractable joint design of downlink beamformers and IRS phase-shifts. In this respect, we consider a generic IRS-aided MIMO wiretap setting and invoke f…
Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are promising enablers for high-capacity wireless communication systems by constructing favorable channels between the transmitter and receiver. However, general, accurate, and tractable outage analysis for IRS-aided multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) systems is not available in the literature. In this paper, we first characterize the mutual information (MI) of IRS-aided MIMO systems by capitalizing on large random matrix theory (RMT). Based on this result, a closed-form approximation for the outage probability is derived and a gradient-based algorithm…
Prior studies on intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) have mostly considered wireless communication systems aided by a single passive IRS, which, however, has limited control over wireless propagation environment and suffers from product-distance path-loss. To address these issues, we propose in this paper a new hybrid active/passive IRS aided wireless communication system, where an active IRS and multiple passive IRSs are deployed to assist the communication between a base station (BS) and a remote user in complex environment, by establishing a multihop reflection path across active/passive I…
We consider an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided mobile edge computing (MEC) system, where an IRS is deployed to assist computation offloading from two users to an access point connected with an edge cloud. For the IRS-aided data transmission, in contrast to the conventional non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA) and time-division multiple-access (TDMA), we propose a new flexible time-sharing NOMA scheme that allows users to flexibly divide their data into two parts transmitted via NOMA and TDMA, respectively, thus encapsulating both conventional NOMA and TDMA as special cases. We form…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technology to extend the wireless signal coverage and support the high performance communication. By intelligently adjusting the reflection coefficients of a large number of passive reflecting elements, the IRS can modify the wireless propagation environment in favour of signal transmission. Different from most of the prior works which did not consider any cooperation between IRSs, in this work we propose and study a cooperative double-IRS aided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system under the line-of-sight (LoS) propagati…
This work studies secure transmission in intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS)-assisted MIMO systems when an active eavesdropper is available in the network. We consider a scenario in which the eavesdropper performs an active pilot attack to contaminate the channel estimation at the base station. Invoking the method of secure regularized zero forcing, we develop an algorithm that designs beamforming vectors, as well as phase-shifts at the IRS, such that the active attacker is blinded. Our numerical investigations confirm that the proposed algorithm can suppress the active eavesdropper effectiv…
This paper investigates effect of malicious intelligence reflecting surface (IRS). The malicious IRS is utilized for performing attack by randomly reflecting data sequences of legitimate users (LUs) to a base station (BS). We find that the data sequences of LUs are correlative to the signals reflected by malicious IRS. The correlation undermines the performance of traditional eigenvalue decomposition (EVD)-based channel estimation (CE) methods. To address this challenge, we propose a empirical-distribution-based channel estimation approach in the presence of malicious IRS. The proposed method …
Unlike active array antennas, intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are efficiently implemented at large dimensions. This allows for traceable realizations of large-scale IRS-aided MIMO systems in which not necessarily the array antennas, but the passive IRSs are large. It is widely believed that large IRS-aided MIMO settings maintain the fundamental features of massive MIMO systems, and hence they are the implementationally feasible technology for establishing the performance of large-scale MIMO settings. This work gives a rigorous proof to this belief. We show that using a large passive IRS…
In this letter, we design passive beamforming in an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted multiple-user wireless network. Two different scenarios are considered, namely, multicasting and multi-user downlink transmission. We optimize the passive beamforming vector of the IRS to maximize the smallest signal-to-noise ratio of the users in both scenarios. Based on the alternating direction method of multipliers algorithm, a low complexity method is designed to iteratively solve the established problem. In each iteration of the proposed method, the solution is in closed form, and thus the c…
In order to meet the demands of future innovative applications, many efforts have been made to exceed the limits predicted by Shannon's Theory. Besides the investigation of beyond-Shannon metrics such as security, latency, and semantics, another direction is to jointly design the transceiver and the environment by utilizing the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). In this paper, we consider the analysis and design of IRS-aided multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) secure communications, which has attracted much research attention but still in its infancy. For example, despite their importance…
In this paper, we propose a robust secrecy transmission scheme for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided communication systems. Different from all the existing works where IRS has already been deployed at a fixed location, we take the location of IRS as a variable to maximize the secrecy rate (SR) under the outage probability constraint by jointly optimizing the location of IRS, transmit beamformer and IRS phase shifts with imperfect channel state information (CSI) of Eve, where we consider two cases: a) the location of Eve is known; b) only a suspicious area of Eve is available. We show …
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. Nevertheless, in the actual network operation, the base station (BS) and IRS may belong to different operators, consequently, the IRS is reluctant to help the BS without any payment. Therefore, this paper investigates price-based reflection resource (elements) allocation strategies for an IRS-aided multiuser multiple-input and single-output (MISO) downlink communication systems,…
In this letter, we consider an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided wireless relaying system, where a decode-and-forward relay (R) is employed to forward data from a source (S) to a destination (D), aided by M passive reflecting elements. We consider two practical IRS deployment strategies, namely, single-IRS deployment where all reflecting elements are mounted on one single IRS that is deployed near S, R, or D, and multi-IRS deployment where the reflecting elements are allocated over three separate IRSs which are deployed near S, R, and D, respectively. Under the line-of-sight (LoS) cha…
To make a good balance between performance, cost, and power consumption, a hybrid intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided directional modulation (DM) network is investigated in this paper, where the hybrid IRS consists of passive and active reflecting elements. To maximize the achievable rate, two optimization algorithms, called maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR)-fractional programming (FP) (Max-SNR-FP) and maximum SNR-equal amplitude reflecting (EAR) (Max-SNR-EAR), are proposed to jointly design the beamforming vector and phase shift matrix (PSM) of hybrid IRS by alternately optimizing on…
Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) has been recently proposed as a promising solution to enhance the spectral and energy efficiency of future wireless networks by tuning a massive number of low-cost passive reflecting elements and thereby constructing favorable wireless propagation environment. Different from the prior works that focus on link-level performance optimization for IRS-aided wireless systems, this letter characterizes the spatial throughput of a single-cell multiuser system aided by multiple IRSs that are randomly deployed in the cell. It is shown by simulation that our analysis…
Active intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) enables flexible signal reflection control with \emph{power amplification}, thus effectively compensating the product-distance path-loss in conventional passive-IRS aided systems. In this letter, we characterize the communication performance of an active-IRS aided single-cell wireless network. To this end, we first propose a \emph{customized} IRS deployment strategy, where the active IRSs are uniformly deployed within a ring concentric with the cell to serve the users far from the base station. Next, given the Nakagami-$m$ fading channel, we characte…
A novel framework of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided multiple-input single-output (MISO) non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) network is proposed, where a base station (BS) serves multiple clusters with unfixed number of users in each cluster. The goal is to maximize the sum rate of all users by jointly optimizing the passive beamforming vector at the IRS, decoding order and power allocation coefficient vector, subject to the rate requirements of users. In order to tackle the formulated problem, a three-step approach is proposed. More particularly, a long short-term memory (LSTM) b…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technology to support high performance wireless communication. By adaptively configuring the reflection amplitude and/or phase of each passive reflecting element on it, the IRS can reshape the electromagnetic environment in favour of signal transmission. This letter advances the existing research by proposing and analyzing a double-IRS aided wireless communication system. Under the reasonable assumption that the reflection channel from IRS 1 to IRS 2 is of rank 1 (e.g., line-of-sight channel), we propose a joint passive beamforming design for…
We consider an Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS)-aided multiple-input single-output (MISO) system for downlink transmission. We compare the performance of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and conventional optimization methods in finding optimal phase shifts of the IRS elements to maximize the user signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio. Furthermore, we evaluate the robustness of these methods to channel impairments and changes in the system. We demonstrate numerically that DRL solutions show more robustness to noisy channels and user mobility.
This paper investigates multiple intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) aided wireless network, where the IRSs are deployed to cooperatively assist communications between a multi-antenna base station (BS) and multiple single-antenna cell-edge users. We aim at maximizing the weighted sum rate of all the cell-edge users by jointly optimizing the BS's transmit beamforming and IRS's phase shifts. Especially, the beamforming is optimally solved by the Lagrangian method, and the phase shifts are obtained based on the Riemannian manifold conjugate gradient (RMCG) method. Numerical results show that a…
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…
As a low-cost and low-power-consumption passive reflector, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) can make a significant rate improvement by building a programmable wireless environment. To improve the rate performance and coverage range of wireless networks, an IRS-aided decode-and-forward (DF) relay network is proposed with multiple antennas at relay station (RS). To achieve a high rate, an alternately iterative structure (AIS) of maximizing receive power (Max-RP) at RS is proposed to jointly optimize the beamforming vectors at RS and phase shifts at IRS. Considering its high-complexity, two l…
We focus on the maximization of the exact ergodic capacity (EC) of a point-to-point multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system assisted by an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). In addition, we account for the effects of correlated Rayleigh fading and the intertwinement between the amplitude and the phase shift of the reflecting coefficient of each IRS element, which are usually both neglected despite their presence in practice. Random matrix theory tools allow to derive the probability density function (PDF) of the cascaded channel in closed form, and subsequently, the EC, which depend on…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has shown its effectiveness in facilitating orthogonal time-division integrated sensing and communications (TD-ISAC), in which the sensing task and the communication task occupy orthogonal time-frequency resources, while the role of IRS in the more interesting scenarios of non-orthogonal ISAC (NO-ISAC) systems has so far remained unclear. In this paper, we consider an IRS-aided NO-ISAC system, where a distributed IRS is deployed to assist concurrent communication and location sensing for a blind-zone user, occupying non-orthogonal/overlapped time-frequency …
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) as a promising technology rendering high throughput in future communication systems is compatible with various communication techniques such as non-orthogonal multiple-access (NOMA). In this paper, the downlink transmission of IRS-assisted NOMA communication is considered while undergoing imperfect channel state information (CSI). Consequently, a robust IRS-aided NOMA design is proposed by solving the sum-rate maximization problem to jointly find the optimal beamforming vectors for the access point and the passive reflection matrix for the IRS, using the pe…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is envisioned to play a significant role in future wireless communication systems thanks to its powerful capability of enabling smart and reconfigurable radio environment. In this paper, we study the multi-IRS aided downlink communication in a massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, where a multi-antenna BS simultaneously serves multiple remote single-antenna users with orthogonal beams reflected by multiple IRSs. By exploiting the line-of-sight (LoS) link between each pair of selected IRSs, a multi-hop cascaded LoS link can be established bet…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technology for achieving spectrum and energy efficient wireless networks cost-effectively. Most existing works on IRS have focused on exploiting IRS to enhance the performance of wireless communication or wireless information transmission (WIT), while its potential for boosting the efficiency of radio-frequency (RF) wireless energy transmission (WET) still remains largely open. Although IRS-aided WET shares similar characteristics with IRS-aided WIT, they differ fundamentally in terms of design objective, receiver architecture, and practical …
We study the beamforming optimization for an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided full-duplex (FD) communication system in this letter. Specifically, we maximize the sum rate of bi-directional transmissions by jointly optimizing the transmit beamforming and the beamforming of the IRS reflection. A fast converging alternating algorithm is developed to tackle this problem. In each iteration of the proposed algorithm, the solutions to the transmit beamforming and the IRS reflect beamforming are obtained in a semi-closed form and a closed form, respectively. Compared to an existing method ba…
This paper investigates the resource allocation algorithm design for intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided multiple-input single-output (MISO) orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) multicell networks, where a set of base stations cooperate to serve a set of ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) users. The IRS is deployed to enhance the communication channel and increase reliability by creating a virtual line of sight for URLLC users with unfavorable propagation conditions. This is the first study on IRS-enhanced OFDMA-URLLC systems. The resource allocation algor…
In this paper, we study two novel massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) transmitter architectures for millimeter wave (mmWave) communications which comprise few active antennas, each equipped with a dedicated radio frequency (RF) chain, that illuminate a nearby large intelligent reflecting/transmitting surface (IRS/ITS). The IRS (ITS) consists of a large number of low-cost and energy-efficient passive antenna elements which are able to reflect (transmit) a phase-shifted version of the incident electromagnetic field. Similar to lens array (LA) antennas, IRS/ITS-aided antenna architectur…
{Robust transceiver design against unresolvable system uncertainties is of crucial importance for reliable communication. We consider a MIMO multi-hop system, where the source, the relay, and the destination are equipped with multiple antennas. Further, an intelligent reconfigurable surface (IRS) is established to cancel the RSI as much as possible. The considered decode-and-forward (DF) hybrid relay can operate in either half-duplex or full-duplex mode, and the mode changes adaptively depending on the RSI strength. We investigate a robust transceiver design problem, which maximizes the throug…
Prior studies on intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) have mostly considered wireless communication systems aided by a single passive IRS, which, however, has limited control over wireless propagation environment and suffers severe product-distance path-loss. To address these issues, we propose in this paper a new multi-active multi-passive (MAMP)-IRS aided wireless communication system, where a number of active and passive IRSs are deployed to assist the downlink communication in complex environment, by establishing a multi-hop reflection path across active and passive IRSs. An optimization p…
Generalized spatial modulation (GenSM) aided millimeter wave (mmWave) multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) has recently received substantial academic attention. However, due to the insufficient exploitation of the transmitter's knowledge of the channel state information (CSI), the achievable rates of state-of-the-art GenSM-aided mmWave MIMO systems are far from being optimal. Against this background, a novel analog precoding scheme is proposed in this paper to improve the spectral efficiency (SE) of conventional GenSM-aided mmWave MIMOs. More specifically, we firstly manage to lower-bound the…
Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) are promising enablers for next-generation wireless communications due to their reconfigurability and high energy efficiency in improving poor propagation condition of channels, e.g., limited scattering environment. However, most existing works assumed full-rank channels requiring rich scatters, which may not be available in practice. To analyze the impact of rank-deficient channels and mitigate the ensued performance loss, we consider a large-scale IRS-aided MIMO system with statistical channel state information (CSI), where the double-scattering channel…
In this letter, we consider an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided wireless communication system, where an active or passive IRS is employed to assist the communication between an access point and a user. First, we consider the downlink/uplink communication separately and optimize the IRS placement for rate maximization with an active or passive IRS. We show that the active IRS should be deployed closer to the receiver with the IRS's decreasing amplification power; while in contrast, the passive IRS should be deployed near either the transmitter or receiver. Moreover, with optimized IRS…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided communication is a promising technology for beyond 5G (B5G) systems, to reconfigure the radio environment proactively. However, IRS-aided communication in practice requires efficient channel estimation or passive beam training, whose overhead and complexity increase drastically with the number of reflecting elements/beam directions. To tackle this challenge, we propose in this paper a novel environment-aware joint active and passive beam selection scheme for IRS-aided wireless communication, based on the new concept of channel knowledge map (CKM). Spe…
Pilot contamination attack (PCA) in a time division duplex wireless communication system is considered, where an eavesdropper (Eve) attacks the reverse pilot transmission phase in order to wiretap the data transmitted from a transmitter, Alice, to a receiver, Bob. We propose a new PCA scheme for Eve, wherein Eve does not emit any signal by itself but uses an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) to reflect the pilot sent by Bob to Alice. The proposed new PCA scheme, referred to as IRS-PCA, increases the signal leakage from Alice to the IRS during the data transmission phase, which is then refle…
In a practical massive MIMO (multiple-input multiple-output) system, the number of antennas at a base station (BS) is constrained by the space and cost factors, which limits the throughput gain promised by theoretical analysis. This paper thus studies the feasibility of adopting the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) to further improve the beamforming gain of the uplink communications in a massive MIMO system. Under such a novel system, the central question lies in whether the IRS is able to enhance the network throughput as expected, if the channel estimation overhead is taken into account.…
This letter investigates physical layer security in intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided visible light communication (VLC). Under the point source assumption, we first elaborate the system model in the scenario with multiple legitimate users and one eavesdropper, where the secrecy rate maximization problem is transformed into an assignment problem by objective function approximation. Then, an iterative Kuhn-Munkres algorithm is proposed to optimize the transformed problem, and its computational complexity is in the second-order form of the numbers of IRS units and transmitters. Moreover,…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising technique for wireless communication networks. By dynamically tuning the reflection amplitudes/phase shifts of a large number of passive elements, IRS enables flexible wireless channel control and configuration, and thereby enhances the wireless signal transmission rate and reliability significantly. Despite the vast literature on designing and optimizing assorted IRS-aided wireless systems, prior works have mainly focused on enhancing wireless links with single signal reflection only by one or multiple IRSs, which may be insuffic…
This work studies the modelling and the optimization of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems through cascaded line-of-sight (LoS) links. In Part I of this work, we build up a new IRS-aided MIMO channel model, named the cascaded LoS MIMO channel. The proposed channel model consists of a transmitter (Tx) and a receiver (Rx) both equipped with uniform linear arrays, and an IRS is used to enable communications between the transmitter and the receiver through the LoS links seen by the IRS. When modeling the reflection of electromagnetic waves a…
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been considered as a promising technology to alleviate the blockage effect and enhance coverage in millimeter wave (mmWave) communication. To explore the impact of IRS on the performance of mmWave communication, we investigate a multi-IRS assisted mmWave communication network and formulate a sum rate maximization problem by jointly optimizing the active and passive beamforming and the set of IRSs for assistance. The optimization problem is intractable due to the lack of convexity of the objective function and the binary nature of the IRS selection varia…
In this paper, we focus on intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted multi-antenna communications with transceiver hardware impairments encountered in practice. In particular, we aim to maximize the received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) taking into account the impact of hardware impairments, where the source transmit beamforming and the IRS reflect beamforming are jointly designed under the proposed optimization framework. To circumvent the non-convexity of the formulated design problem, we first derive a closed-form optimal solution to the source transmit beamforming. Then, for the optimiz…
