Designing Wireless Powered Networks Assisted by Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces With Mechanical Tilt

In this letter, we propose a fairness-aware rate maximization scheme for a wireless powered communications network (WPCN) assisted by an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). The proposed scheme combines user scheduling based on time division multiple access (TDMA) and (mechanical) angular displacem...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE communications letters 2021-10, Vol.25 (10), p.3355-3359
Main Authors: Hadzi-Velkov, Zoran, Pejoski, Slavche, Zlatanov, Nikola, Gacanin, Haris
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Antennas
Design optimization
Downlink
Energy harvesting
intelligent reflecting surfaces
Network design
Optimization
Radio frequency
Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces
Resource management
System performance
Time Division Multiple Access
Wireless communications
Wireless networks
Wireless power transfer
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Summary:In this letter, we propose a fairness-aware rate maximization scheme for a wireless powered communications network (WPCN) assisted by an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS). The proposed scheme combines user scheduling based on time division multiple access (TDMA) and (mechanical) angular displacement of the IRS. Each energy harvesting user (EHU) has dedicated time slots with optimized durations for energy harvesting and information transmission whereas, the phase matrix of the IRS is adjusted to focus its beam to a particular EHU. The proposed scheme exploits the fundamental dependence of the IRS channel path-loss on the angle between the IRS and the node's line-of-sight, which is often overlooked in the literature. Additionally, the network design can be optimized for large number of IRS unit cells, which is not the case with the computationally intensive state-of-the-art schemes. In fact, the EHUs can achieve significant rates at practical distances of several tens of meters to the base station (BS) only if the number of IRS unit cells is at least a few thousand.
ISSN:1089-7798
1558-2558
DOI:10.1109/LCOMM.2021.3098128