Integrating Movable Antennas and Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (MA-IRS): Fundamentals, Practical Solutions, and ISAC

TL;DR

This paper explores the integration of movable antennas and intelligent reflecting surfaces to enhance wireless communication systems by improving capacity, coverage, and sensing capabilities through fundamental analysis and practical solutions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of MA-IRS integration, addressing design issues, performance gains, practical challenges, and solutions for next-generation wireless systems.

Findings

MA-IRS integration significantly boosts network capacity and coverage.

Practical design solutions include optimization schemes and hardware architectures.

MA-IRS architectures support advanced sensing and dual-functional applications.

Abstract

Movable antennas (MAs) and intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) enable active antenna repositioning and passive phase-shift tuning for channel reconfiguration, respectively. Integrating MAs and IRSs boosts spatial degrees of freedom, significantly enhancing wireless network capacity, coverage, and reliability. In this article, we first present the fundamentals of MA-IRS integration, involving clarifying the key design issues, revealing performance gain, and identifying the conditions where MA-IRS synergy persists. Then, we examine practical challenges and propose pragmatic design solutions, including optimization schemes, hardware architectures, deployment strategies, and robust designs for hardware impairments and mobility management. In addition, we highlight how MA-IRS architectures uniquely support advanced integrated sensing and communication, enhancing sensing performance and dual-functional flexibility. Overall, MA-IRS integration emerges as a compelling approach toward next-generation reconfigurable wireless systems.