# Does an IRS Degrade Out-of-Band Performance?

## TL;DR

This paper investigates whether intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) negatively impact out-of-band performance in multi-operator wireless systems, finding that IRSs surprisingly benefit all operators by enhancing signal paths and diversity.

## Contribution

The study derives the ergodic sum spectral efficiency and OOB channel change distribution, revealing that IRSs improve out-of-band performance even when optimized for a single operator.

## Key findings

- IRS enhances out-of-band operator performance despite random configurations.
- IRS introduces additional signal paths, increasing diversity and signal power.
- Both operators benefit from IRS deployment, even when only one is targeted.

## Abstract

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) were introduced to enhance the performance of wireless systems. However, from a cellular service provider's view, a concern with the use of an IRS is its effect on out-of-band (OOB) quality of service. Specifically, given two operators, say X and Y, providing services in a geographical area using non-overlapping frequency bands, if operator-X uses an IRS to optimally enhance the throughput of its users, does the IRS degrade the performance of operator-Y? We answer this by deriving the ergodic sum spectral efficiency (SE) of both operators under round-robin scheduling. We also derive the complementary cumulative distribution function of the change in effective channel at an OOB user with and without the IRS, which provides deeper insights into OOB performance. Surprisingly, we find that even though the IRS is randomly configured from operator-Y's view, the OOB operator still benefits from the IRS, witnessing a performance enhancement for free. This happens because the IRS introduces additional paths between the nodes, increasing the signal power at the receiver and providing diversity benefits. We verify our findings numerically and conclude that an IRS is beneficial to every operator, even when the IRS is deployed to optimally serve only one operator.