Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Network: Power Control for Physical-Layer Broadcasting

As a recently proposed idea for the future wireless systems, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) can assist communications between entities which do not have high-quality direct channels in between. Specifically, an IRS comprises many low-cost passive elements, each of which reflects the incident signal by incurring a phase change so that the reflected signals add coherently at the receiver. In this paper, for an IRS-aided wireless network, we study the problem of power control at the base station (BS) for physical-layer broadcasting under quality of service constraints, by jointly designing the transmit beamforming at the BS and the phase shifts of the IRS units. Furthermore, we derive a lower bound of the minimum transmit power at the BS to validate the proposed optimization method. Simulation results show that, the transmit power at the BS approaches the lower bound with the increase of the number of IRS units, and is much lower than that of the communication system without the IRS.