Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Wireless Communications: A Tutorial
It provides a tutorial for researchers and engineers on IRS-aided wireless communications, which is incremental as it synthesizes existing knowledge rather than introducing new methods.
This tutorial overview addresses the challenges of integrating Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (IRS) into wireless networks, such as reflection optimization and channel estimation, by elaborating on models, hardware, and applications to enhance communication performance cost-effectively.
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.