Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Wireless Communications: A Tutorial

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.

Automated summary

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a technology that can alter wireless signal propagation in wireless networks by dynamically changing wireless channels to enhance communication performance. The future hybrid wireless network aided by IRS, comprising both active and passive components, is expected to achieve sustainable capacity growth cost-effectively.