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Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) have received considerable attention from the wireless communications research community recently. In particular, as low-cost passive devices, IRSs enable the control of the wireless propagation environment, which is not possible in conventional wireless networks. To take full advantage of such IRS-assisted communication systems, both the beamformer at the access point (AP) and the phase shifts at the IRS need to be optimally designed. However, thus far, the optimal design is not well understood. In this paper, a point-to-point IRS-assisted multiple-input single-output (MISO) communication system is investigated. The beamformer at the AP and the IRS phase shifts are jointly optimized to maximize the spectral efficiency. Two efficient algorithms exploiting fixed point iteration and manifold optimization techniques, respectively, are developed for solving the resulting non-convex optimization problem. The proposed algorithms not only achieve a higher spectral efficiency but also lead to a lower computational complexity than the state-of-the-art approach. Simulation results reveal that deploying large-scale IRSs in wireless systems is more efficient than increasing the antenna array size at the AP for enhancing both the spectral and the energy efficiency.

Wireless communications via intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) has received considerable attention from both academia and industry. In particular, IRSs are able to create favorable wireless propagation environments with typically lowcost passive devices. While various IRS-aided wireless communication systems have been investigated in the literature, thus far, the optimal design of such systems is not well understood. In this paper, IRS-assisted single-user multiple-input single-output (MISO) communication is investigated. To maximize the spectral efficiency, a branch-and-bound (BnB) algorithm is proposed to obtain globally optimal solutions for both the active and passive beamformers at the access point (AP) and the IRS, respectively. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of deploying IRSs in wireless systems. Furthermore, by taking the proposed optimal BnB algorithm as the performance benchmark, the optimality of existing design algorithms is investigated.

In this paper, we investigate the resource allocation algorithm design for multicarrier solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) communication systems. In particular, the UAV is powered by solar energy enabling sustainable communication services to multiple ground users. We study the joint design of the three-dimensional (3D) aerial trajectory and the wireless resource allocation for maximization of the system sum throughput over a given time period. As a performance benchmark, we first consider an offline resource allocation design assuming non-causal knowledge of the channel gains. The algorithm design is formulated as a mixed-integer non-convex optimization problem taking into account the aerodynamic power consumption, solar energy harvesting, a finite energy storage capacity, and the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of the users. Despite the non-convexity of the optimization problem, we solve it optimally by applying monotonic optimization to obtain the optimal 3D-trajectory and the optimal power and subcarrier allocation policy. Subsequently, we focus on online algorithm design which only requires real-time and statistical knowledge of the channel gains. The optimal online resource allocation algorithm is motivated by the offline scheme and entails a high computational complexity. Hence, we also propose a low-complexity iterative suboptimal online scheme based on successive convex approximation. Our simulation results reveal that both proposed online schemes closely approach the performance of the benchmark offline scheme and substantially outperform two baseline schemes. Furthermore, our results unveil the tradeoff between solar energy harvesting and power-efficient communication. In particular, the solar-powered UAV first climbs up to a high altitude to harvest a sufficient amount of solar energy and then descents again to a lower altitude to reduce the path loss of the communication links to the users it serves.

In this paper, we study resource allocation design for secure communication in intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)assisted multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) communication systems. To enhance physical layer security, artificial noise (AN) is transmitted from the base station (BS) to deliberately impair the channel of an eavesdropper. In particular, we jointly optimize the phase shift matrix at the IRS and the beamforming vectors and AN covariance matrix at the BS for maximization of the system sum secrecy rate. To handle the resulting nonconvex optimization problem, we develop an efficient suboptimal algorithm based on alternating optimization, successive convex approximation, semidefinite relaxation, and manifold optimization. Our simulation results reveal that the proposed scheme substantially improves the system sum secrecy rate compared to two baseline schemes.