Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) Aided Wireless Communications: State-of-Art and The Road Ahead

Dr. Rui Zhang (IEEE Fellow) received the B.Eng. (First-Class Hons.) and M.Eng. degrees from National University of Singapore, and the Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, Stanford, CA USA, all in electrical engineering. From 2007 to 2009, he worked as a researcher at the Institute for Infocomm Research, ASTAR, Singapore. Since 2010, he has joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of National University of Singapore, where he is now a Provost’s Chair Professor in the Faculty of Engineering. His current research interests include UAV/satellite communication, wireless power transfer, reconfigurable MIMO, and optimization methods. He has published over 450 papers in the field of wireless communications, which have been cited more than 49,000 times, with the h-index over 110. He has been listed as a Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics since 2015. He was the recipient of the IEEE Communications Society Asia-Pacific Region Best Young Researcher Award in 2011, the Young Researcher Award of National University of Singapore in 2015, the Wireless Communications Technical Committee Recognition Award in 2020, and the IEEE Signal Processing and Computing for Communications (SPCC) Technical Recognition Award in 2020. He was the co-recipient of the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award in Wireless Communications in 2015 and 2020, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award in 2016, the IEEE Communications Society Heinrich Hertz Prize Paper Award in 2017 and 2020, the IEEE Signal Processing Society Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award in 2017, the IEEE Communications Society Asia-Pacific Region Best Paper Award in 2016, and the IEEE Technical Committee on Green Communications & Computing (TCGCC) Best Journal Paper Award in 2017. His co-authored paper also received the IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award in 2017. He served for over 30 international conferences as the TPC Co-Chair or an Organizing Committee Member, and as the guest editor for 3 special issues in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing and IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications. He served as an elected member of the IEEE Signal Processing Society SPCOM and SAM Technical Committees, and the Vice Chair of the IEEE Communications Society Asia-Pacific Board Technical Affairs Committee. He served as an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (Green Communications and Networking Series), IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, and IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking. He is now an editor for the IEEE Transactions on Communications. He serves as a member of the Steering Committee of the IEEE Wireless Communications Letters. He served as a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Signal Processing Society and IEEE Communications Society from 2019 to 2020.

Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) has recently emerged as the new wireless communication research frontier, with the goal of achieving smart and reconfigurable radio propagation environment for the future wireless networks via passive and tunable signal reflections. Featured by orders-of-magnitude lower hardware and energy cost than traditional active arrays/relays and yet superior beamforming performance as well as other new functionalities, IRS is expected to be a key driving technology for B5G/6G wireless networks, especially for enabling them to migrate to higher frequency bands (mmWave/THz) cost-effectively. More importantly, IRS will fundamentally reshape today’s wireless network with active nodes solely to a new IRS-aided hybrid network comprising both active and passive components co-working in an intelligent way, so as to achieve a sustainable capacity growth with low and affordable cost in the future. In this talk, we will provide an overview of IRS, including its motivations, promising applications in wireless networks, communication basics, main design challenges, and their state-of-the-art solutions. Important directions worthy of further investigation will also be discussed.