Two-Scale Spatial Deployment for Cost-Effective Wireless Networks via Cooperative IRSs and Movable Antennas

Abstract: This paper proposes a two-scale spatial deployment strategy to ensure reliable coverage for multiple target areas, integrating macroscopic intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) and fine-grained movable antennas (MAs). Specifically, IRSs are selectively deployed from candidate sites to shape the propagation geometry, while MAs are locally repositioned among discretized locations to exploit small-scale channel variations. The objective is to minimize the total deployment cost of MAs and IRSs by jointly optimizing the IRS site selection, MA positions, transmit precoding, and IRS phase shifts, subject to the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) requirements for all target areas. This leads to a challenging mixed-integer non-convex optimization problem that is intractable to solve directly. To address this, we first formulate an auxiliary problem to verify the feasibility. A penalty-based double-loop algorithm integrating alternating optimization and successive convex approximation (SCA) is developed to solve this feasibility issue, which is subsequently adapted to obtain a suboptimal solution for the original cost minimization problem. Finally, based on the obtained solution, we formulate an element refinement problem to further reduce the deployment cost, which is solved by a penalty-based SCA algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed designs consistently outperform benchmarks relying on independent area planning or full IRS deployment in terms of cost-efficiency. Moreover, for cost minimization, MA architectures are preferable in large placement apertures, whereas fully populated FPA architectures excel in compact ones; for worst-case SNR maximization, MA architectures exhibit a lower cost threshold for feasibility, while FPA architectures can attain peak SNR at a lower total cost.