TY - JOUR
T1 - Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Wireless Communications: A Tutorial
AU - Wu, Qingqing
AU - Zhang, Shuowen
AU - Zheng, Beixiong
AU - You, Changsheng
AU - Zhang, Rui
N1 - Funding Information:
Manuscript received July 5, 2020; revised November 27, 2020; accepted December 28, 2020. Date of publication January 18, 2021; date of current version May 18, 2021. The work of Qingqing Wu is supported in part by SRG2020-00024-IOTSC and FDCT 0108/2020/A. This work is supported in part by the National University of Singapore under Research Grant R-261-518-005-720. The associate editor coordinating the review of this article and approving it for publication was D. W. K. Ng. (Corresponding author: Rui Zhang.) Qingqing Wu was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117583. He is now with the State Key Laboratory of Internet of Things for Smart City and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Macau, Macau 999078, China (e-mail: [email protected]).
Publisher Copyright:
© 1972-2012 IEEE.
PY - 2021/5
Y1 - 2021/5
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Antennas
KW - Fading channels
KW - Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)
KW - IRS applications
KW - IRS channel estimation
KW - IRS channel model
KW - IRS deployment
KW - IRS hardware architecture and practical constraints
KW - IRS reflection optimization
KW - IRS-aided wireless communication
KW - MIMO communication
KW - Relays
KW - Reliability
KW - smart and reconfigurable environment
KW - Wireless networks
KW - Wireless sensor networks
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85099729045&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TCOMM.2021.3051897
DO - 10.1109/TCOMM.2021.3051897
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85099729045
SN - 0090-6778
VL - 69
SP - 3313
EP - 3351
JO - IEEE Transactions on Communications
JF - IEEE Transactions on Communications
IS - 5
M1 - 9326394
ER -