Massive distributed IRS aided wireless communication with ON/OFF selection

Abstract

The mobile communication system beyond fifth-generation (beyond 5G) is required to maintain higher transmission capacity and reliability than existing 5G systems. To meet these requirements, one promising solution is to incorporate an Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS). The IRS involves reconfiguring the wireless propagation environment and exploiting the radio resources, not only in the conventional frequency and time domains but also in the spatial domain by controlling the reflection amplitude and phase of the incident electromagnetic signal. However, increased deployment of IRSs brings about interference and greater complexity. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an ON/OFF IRS selection method on massive IRS aided wireless communications that can simultaneously achieve interference suppression and capacity improvement. In addition, the proposed method reduces operational complexity using a simple 1-bit control. The results of computer simulation and experiment show that the proposed method can improve the desired channel capacity beyond directly Single-Input Single-Output (SISO) communication without IRS while maintaining the interference level of an interfered receiver below a certain threshold.