Joint Hardware Design and Capacity Analysis for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Enabled Terahertz MIMO Communications

Abstract: Terahertz (THz) communications have been envisioned as a promising enabler to provide ultra-high data transmission for sixth generation (6G) wireless networks. To tackle the blockage vulnerability brought by severe path attenuation and poor diffraction of THz waves, an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is put forward to smartly control the incident THz waves by adjusting the phase shifts. In this paper, we firstly design an efficient hardware structure of graphene-based IRS with phase response up to 306.82 degrees. Subsequently, to characterize the capacity of the IRS-enabled THz multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, an adaptive gradient descent (A-GD) algorithm is developed by dynamically updating the step size during the iterative process, which is determined by the second-order Taylor expansion formulation. In contrast with conventional gradient descent (C-GD) algorithm with fixed step size, the A-GD algorithm evidently improves the achievable rate performance. However, both A-GD algorithm and C-GD algorithm inherit the unacceptable complexity. Then a low complexity alternating optimization (AO) algorithm is proposed by alternately optimizing the precoding matrix by a column-by-column (CBC) algorithm and the phase shift matrix of the IRS by a linear search algorithm. Ultimately, the numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed hardware structure and the considered algorithms.