Aerial IRS-assisted Wireless Communication Systems

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising technology that open-up the window for manipulating the wireless channel. This introduced an additional degree of freedom in designing the future wireless communication system. The performance of a simple aerial IRS (AIRS) assisted wireless communication system is investigated in this paper by jointly optimizing the active and passive beamforming to maximize the sum-rate (SR). An alternating iterative algorithm is exploited to convert the non-convex optimization problem into two suboptimal problems corresponding to the active and passive beamforming. The simulated results highlight the possible SR gain that one can achieve through optimization in comparison to the un-optimized scenario. It also demonstrates the fact that optimization of beamforming also enhances the power efficiency of the system and also the impact of the IRS structure.