Cooperative Double-IRS Aided Communication: Beamforming Design and Power Scaling

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technology to support high performance wireless communication. By adaptively configuring the reflection amplitude and/or phase of each passive reflecting element on it, the IRS can reshape the electromagnetic environment in favour of signal transmission. This letter advances the existing research by proposing and analyzing a <italic>double-IRS</italic> aided wireless communication system. Under the reasonable assumption that the reflection channel from IRS 1 to IRS 2 is of rank 1 (e.g., line-of-sight channel), we propose a joint passive beamforming design for the two IRSs. Based on this, we show that deploying two cooperative IRSs with in total <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${K}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> elements can yield a power gain of order <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathcal {O}(K^{4})$ </tex-math></inline-formula>, which greatly outperforms the case of deploying one traditional IRS with a power gain of order <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathcal {O}(K^{2})$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. Our simulation results validate that the performance of deploying two cooperative IRSs is significantly better than that of deploying one IRS given a sufficient total number of IRS elements. We also extend our line-of-sight channel model to show how different channel models affect the performance of the double-IRS aided wireless communication system.