Coordinated Passive Beamforming for Distributed Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces Network

Abstract: Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a proposing technology in 6G to enhance the performance of wireless networks by smartly reconfiguring the propagation environment with a large number of passive reflecting elements. However, current works mainly focus on single IRS-empowered wireless networks, where the channel rank deficiency problem has emerged. In this paper, we propose a distributed IRS-empowered communication network architecture, where multiple source-destination pairs communicate through multiple distributed IRSs. We further contribute to maximize the achievable sum-rates in this network via jointly optimizing the transmit power vector at the sources and the phase shift matrix with passive beamforming at all distributed IRSs. Unfortunately, this problem turns out to be non-convex and highly intractable, for which an alternating approach is developed via solving the resulting fractional programming problems alternatively. In particular, the closed-form expressions are proposed for coordinated passive beamforming at IRSs. The numerical results will demonstrate the algorithmic advantages and desirable performances of the distributed IRS-empowered communication network.