Cooperative beamforming for a double-IRS-assisted wireless communication system

Abstract Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as an innovative and disruptive solution to boost the spectral and energy efficiency and enlarge the coverage of wireless communication systems. However, the existing literature on IRS mainly concentrates on wireless communication systems assisted by single or multiple distributed IRSs, which are not always effective. In view of this issue, this paper considers a special double-IRS-assisted wireless communication system, where IRS1 and IRS2 are deployed near the base station (BS) and the user, respectively, and the transmitted signals reach the user via the cascaded BS-IRS1-IRS2-user channel only. We cooperatively optimize transmit and passive beamforming on the two IRSs based on the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm to maximize the received signal power. Simulation indicates that despite no direct line-of-sight (LoS) path from the BS to the user, an excellent signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is available at the receiver with the aid of two IRSs, which demonstrates that it is feasible to assist communication by double reflection links composed of two IRSs. Additionally, we unexpectedly find that when the positions of the two IRSs are fixed, by exchanging the positions of the BS and the user, the obtainable SNRs are similar