Understanding the Gain of Deploying IRSs in Large-scale Heterogeneous Cellular Networks

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how deploying intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) in large-scale heterogeneous cellular networks enhances coverage and throughput, providing a stochastic geometry-based framework to quantify these gains.

Contribution

It introduces an analytical framework for evaluating the impact of IRSs in multi-tier cellular networks, highlighting the potential coverage and throughput improvements.

Findings

IRS deployment significantly improves coverage probability.

IRSs increase network spatial throughput.

Analytical results quantify the maximum gains achievable.

Abstract

As the superior improvement on wireless network coverage, spectrum efficiency and energy efficiency, Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has received more and more attention. In this work, we consider a large-scale IRS-assisted heterogeneous cellular network (HCN) consisting of $K$ ($K \geq 2$) tiers of base stations (BSs) and one tier of passive IRSs. With tools from stochastic geometry, we analyze the coverage probability and network spatial throughput of the downlink IRS-assisted $K$-tier HCN. Compared with the conventional HCN, we observe the significant gain achieved by IRSs in coverage probability and network spatial throughput. The proposed analytical framework can be used to understand the limit of gain achieved by IRSs in HCN.