Wireless-Powered Over-the-Air Computation in Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided IoT Networks

Fast wireless data aggregation and efficient battery recharging are two critical design challenges of Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks. Over-the-air computation (AirComp) and energy beamforming (EB) turn out to be two promising techniques that can address these two challenges, necessitating the design of wireless-powered AirComp. However, due to severe channel propagation, the energy harvested by IoT devices may not be sufficient to support AirComp. In this article, we propose to leverage the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) that is capable of dynamically reconfiguring the propagation environment to drastically enhance the efficiency of both downlink EB and uplink AirComp in IoT networks. Due to the coupled problems of downlink EB and uplink AirComp, we further propose the joint design of energy and aggregation beamformers at the access point, downlink/uplink phase-shift matrices at the IRS, and transmit power at the IoT devices, to minimize the mean-squared error (MSE), which quantifies the AirComp distortion. However, the formulated problem is a highly intractable nonconvex quadratic programming problem. To solve this problem, we first obtain the closed-form expressions of the energy beamformer and the device transmit power, and then develop an alternating optimization framework based on difference-of-convex programming to design the aggregation beamformers and IRS phase-shift matrices. Simulation results demonstrate the performance gains of the proposed algorithm over the baseline methods and show that deploying an IRS can significantly reduce the MSE of AirComp.