Beamforming Design for Cooperative Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Assisted mmWave Communication

Sensors (Basel). 2022 Aug 18;22(16):6214. doi: 10.3390/s22166214.

Abstract

In order to investigate the effect of cooperative Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) in improving spectral efficiency, this paper explores the joint design of active and passive beamforming based on a double IRS-assisted model. First, considering the maximum power constraint of the active vector and the unit modulus constraint of the cooperative passive vector, we establish the non-linear and non-convex optimization problem of multi-user maximization weighted sum rate (WSR). Then, we propose an alternating optimization (AO) algorithm to design the active vector and the cooperative passive vector based on fractional programming (FP) and successive convex approximations (SCA). In addition, we conduct a study on the optimization of the passive reflection vector under discrete phase shift. The simulation results show that the proposed beamforming scheme of double IRS-assisted model performs better than the conventional single IRS-assisted model.

Keywords: IRS deployment; Intelligent Reflecting Surface; cooperative passive beamforming; fractional programming; millimeter-wave communication.