Intelligent Reflecting Surface Empowered Transmission Techniques for Next-Generation Communication Systems

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Next-generation communication systems are expected to support explosive data rate and ultra-low latency transmissions and enable pervasive connectivity. Such stringent requirements pose serious challenges on the existing cellular systems infrastructure, and it is of great interest to explore novel and innovative transmission techniques that can achieve higher spectral- and energy-efficiencies to meet such demands. Over the past decades, various advanced techniques that facilitate signal transmission and reception at the transceivers have been proposed, however little attention has been paid to the wireless propagation environment. Indeed, the wireless propagation environment has long been perceived as an uncontrollable and randomly behaving entity between the transceivers. Aside from being uncontrollable, the environment usually has an adverse impact on the communication efficiency, owing to the signal attenuation, fading and interference introduced. Recently, there is increasing demand for novel communication paradigms that can exploit the randomness of the propagation environment, either to increase the communication efficiency or to simplify the transceiver architecture. In this regard, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has received great attention owing to its ability to reconfigure the propagation environment via software-controlled reflection. An IRS is a planar surface consisting of many low-cost passive reflecting elements, each able to induce an amplitude and phase change to the incident signal to achieve fine-grained reflective beamforming. This proposal will investigate novel IRS-empowered transmission techniques to realize our long-term goal of increasing the spectral- and energy-efficiencies of next-generation cellular systems, through the following three short-term thrusts: 1) developing novel and low-complexity resource allocation and beamforming techniques for IRS-assisted systems; 2) studying the integration of IRS with other candidate technologies for next-generation communication systems, such as millimeter wave, non-orthogonal multiple access, and physical layer security; and 3) analyzing and quantifying the effects of various transmission impairments, such as imperfect channel state information, discrete phase shifts, and random phase noise on the performance of IRS-assisted transmission and developing novel signal processing techniques to combat such impairments. The proposed research program will provide a systematic framework to address various design issues in IRS-empowered physical layer transmission, and further boost the performance of next-generation cellular systems. Therefore,  the research findings are anticipated to draw attention from both academia and industry, and lead to research collaboration. Meanwhile, the proposed research program will train and equip highly qualified personnel with essential skills in communication theory and signal processing to contribute to Canada's tech and academic sectors.