Performance Study on the Intelligent Reflecting Surface Based Relay Communication Systems

An Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) is an innovative technology designed to enhance 6 G cellular mobile communication. It consists of a large array of low-cost, passive elements that can reflect and manipulate incoming signals in realtime. By adjusting the phase shifts of these elements, IRS can control the propagation environment, improving signal strength and coverage. Consider a system model having a source base station (BS), an IRS relay unit, and destination. When the channel conditions between the BS and destination is poor then the IRS unit provides additional diverse path between BS and destination. At the destination, Maximal Ratio Combining (MRC) and Selection Combining (SC) are used to combine the signals from both the paths. In this paper, we have developed algorithms to assess the performance of this system in the presence of Rayleigh fading and M-ary Phase-Shift Keying modulation. Results show that the MRC provides 17 dB gain over SC at symbol error rate of 10<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−3</sup> with reflecting element=12. In addition, it is inferred that the BS with IRS system performs better than the without IRS system.