2020/07/06 by Qingqing Wu, Shuowen Zhang, Wu, Qingqing +7 · 57 citations
Engineering · #Advanced Antenna and Metasurface Technologies #Advanced Wireless Communication Technologies #Antenna Design and Analysis #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Information Theory (cs.IT) #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2007.02759
openalex publication_date 2020/07/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is an enabling technology to engineer the radio signal prorogation 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 communication 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.