Sum Rate Maximization for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Terahertz Communications

Abstract: In this paper, an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is deployed to assist the terahertz (THz) communications. The molecular absorption causes path loss peaks to appear in the THz frequency band, and the fading peak is greatly affected by the transmission distance. In this paper, we aim to maximize the sum rate with individual rate constraints, in which the IRS location, IRS phase shift, the allocation of sub-bands of the THz spectrum, and power control for UEs are jointly optimized. For the special case of a single user equipment (UE) with a single sub-band, the globally optimal solution is provided. For the general case with multiple UEs, the block coordinate searching (BCS) based algorithm is proposed to solve the non-convex problem. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can significantly enhance system performance.