Channel Estimation for Practical IRS-Assisted OFDM Systems

Abstract: Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS), composed of a large number of hardware-efficient passive elements, is deemed as a potential technique for future wireless communications since it can adaptively enhance the propagation environment. In order to effectively utilize IRS to achieve promising beamforming gains, the problem of channel state information (CSI) acquisition needs to be carefully considered. However, most recent works assume to employ an ideal IRS, i.e., each reflecting element has constant amplitude, variable phase shifts, as well as the same response for the signals with different frequencies, which will cause severe estimation error due to the mismatch between the ideal IRS and the practical one. In this paper, we study channel estimation in practical IRS-aided orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems with discrete phase shifts. Different from the prior works which assume that IRS has an ideal reflection model, we perform channel estimation by considering amplitude-phase shift-frequency relationship for the response of practical IRS. Aiming at minimizing normalized-mean-square-error (NMSE) of the estimated channel, a novel IRS time-varying reflection pattern is designed by leveraging the alternating optimization (AO) algorithm for the case of using low-resolution phase shifters. Moreover, for the high-resolution IRS cases, we provide another practical reflection pattern scheme to further reduce the complexity. Simulation results demonstrate the necessity of considering practical IRS model for channel estimation and the effectiveness of our proposed channel estimation methods.