Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Assisted Millimeter Wave Communications: Joint Active and Passive Precoding Design

Understand

Millimeter wave (MmWave) communications is capable of supporting multi-gigabit wireless access thanks to its abundant spectrum resource.

• However, the severe path loss and high directivity make it vulnerable to blockage events, which can be frequent in indoor and dense urban environments.
• To address this issue, in this paper, we introduce intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) as a new technology to provide effective reflected paths to enhance coverage of mmWave signals.
• In this framework, we study joint active and passive precoding design for IRS-assisted mmWave systems, where multiple IRSs are deployed to assist the data transmission from a base station (BS) to a single-antenna receiver.