Intelligent Reflecting Surface Configurations for Smart Radio Using Deep Reinforcement Learning

Abstract: Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is envisioned to change the paradigm of wireless communications from "adapting to wireless channels" to "changing wireless channels". However, current IRS configuration schemes, consisting of sub-channel estimation and passive beamforming in sequence, conform to the conventional model-based design philosophies and are difficult to be realized practically in the complex radio environment. To create the smart radio environment, we propose a model-free design of IRS control that is independent of the sub-channel channel state information (CSI) and requires the minimum interaction between IRS and the wireless communication system. We firstly model the control of IRS as a Markov decision process (MDP) and apply deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to perform real-time coarse phase control of IRS. Then, we apply extremum seeking control (ESC) as the fine phase control of IRS. Finally, by updating the frame structure, we integrate DRL and ESC in the model-free control of IRS to improve its adaptivity to different channel dynamics. Numerical results show the superiority of our proposed joint DRL and ESC scheme and verify its effectiveness in model-free IRS control without sub-channel CSI.