Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Wireless Energy and Information Transmission: An Overview

Abstract

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technology for achieving spectrum and energy efficient wireless networks cost-effectively. Most existing works on IRS have focused on exploiting IRS to enhance the performance of wireless communication or wireless information transmission (WIT), while its potential for boosting the efficiency of radio-frequency (RF) wireless energy transmission (WET) still remains largely open. Although IRS-aided WET shares similar characteristics with IRS-aided WIT, they differ fundamentally in terms of design objective, receiver architecture, practical constraints, and so on. In this paper, we provide a tutorial overview on how to efficiently design IRS-aided WET systems as well as IRS-aided systems with both WIT and WET, namely IRS-aided simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) and IRS-aided wireless powered communication network (WPCN), from a communication and signal processing perspective. In particular, we present state-of-theart solutions to tackle the unique challenges in operating these systems, such as IRS passive reflection optimization, channel estimation and deployment. In addition, we propose new solution approaches and point out important directions for future research and investigation.

Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Aided Position and Orientation Estimation Based on Joint Beamforming With Limited Feedback

“…Since the phase shifts at RIS are controllable, the signal processing carried out by the RIS is the same as passive beamforming. Thus, the MS can adjust the reflected phases at RIS by the limited feedback transmitted through a wireless control link based on the downlink PRS reflected by the RIS to the MS, with the objective, such as, to maximize the received signal power [24,43]. Fig.…”