Towards Smart Wireless Communications via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces: A Contemporary Survey
Shimin Gong, Xiao Lu, Dinh Thai Hoang, Dusit Niyato, Lei Shu, Dong In, Kim, and Ying-Chang Liang

TL;DR
This survey reviews the development and application of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) in wireless networks, highlighting their potential to actively control signal propagation and improve performance in future 5G and beyond systems.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive overview of IRS concepts, applications, optimization techniques, and practical challenges, offering insights into future research directions.
Findings
IRS can actively control wireless signal reflections.
Joint optimization of IRS phase control and transmission improves network performance.
IRS-enabled networks show significant potential for beyond 5G communications.
Abstract
This paper presents a literature review on recent applications and design aspects of the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in the future wireless networks. Conventionally, the network optimization has been limited to transmission control at two endpoints, i.e., end users and network controller. The fading wireless channel is uncontrollable and becomes one of the main limiting factors for performance improvement. The IRS is composed of a large array of scattering elements, which can be individually configured to generate additional phase shifts to the signal reflections. Hence, it can actively control the signal propagation properties in favor of signal reception, and thus realize the notion of a smart radio environment. As such, the IRS's phase control, combined with the conventional transmission control, can potentially bring performance gain compared to wireless networks without…
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