Intelligent Reflecting Surface: Practical Phase Shift Model and Beamforming Optimization

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) that enables the control of wireless propagation environment has recently emerged as a promising cost-effective technology for boosting the spectral and energy efficiency of future wireless communication systems. Prior works on IRS are mainly based on the ideal phase shift model assuming full signal reflection by each of its elements regardless of the phase shift, which, however, is practically difficult to realize. In contrast, we propose in this paper a practical phase shift model that captures the phase-dependent amplitude variation in the element-wise reflection design. Based on the proposed model and considering an IRS-aided multiuser system with one IRS deployed to assist in the downlink communications from a multi-antenna access point (AP) to multiple single-antenna users, we formulate an optimization problem to minimize the total transmit power at the AP by jointly designing the AP transmit beamforming and the IRS reflect beamforming, subject to the users' individual signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) constraints. Iterative algorithms are proposed to find suboptimal solutions to this problem efficiently by utilizing the alternating optimization (AO) as well as penalty-based optimization techniques. Moreover, to draw essential insight, we analyze the asymptotic performance loss of the IRS-aided system that employs practical phase shifters but assumes the ideal phase shift model for beamforming optimization, as the number of IRS elements goes to infinity. Simulation results unveil substantial performance gains achieved by the proposed beamforming optimization based on the practical phase shift model as compared to the conventional ideal model.