Assessment of signal strength in intelligent reflecting surface-aided wireless communication systems

Abstract With the next-generation development of wireless communication networks, new technologies have been suggested to face the new research challenges that emerged. One of these technologies is the intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). The IRS is a promising technology for controlling of wireless propagation environment and improve the quality of communication by achieve high spectrum and energy efficiency. In this paper, the performance of IRS-aided wireless communication system is investigated. The performance dependence on the components of IRS elements is studied. It is shown that the components of IRS elements play a crucial role in determining both the amplitude and phase of the reflection coefficients. Higher reflection coefficients produce more energy being reflected back, resulting in signal strength enhancement. This qualifies the IRS to increase the received signal strength and improve signal coverage at the desired receiver. So, in this paper, we can choose the best values for each of the effective capacitance $$C$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>C</mml:mi> </mml:math> , bottom layer inductance $${L}_{1}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>L</mml:mi> <mml:mn>1</mml:mn> </mml:msub> </mml:math> , top layer inductance $${L}_{2}$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:msub> <mml:mi>L</mml:mi> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:msub> </mml:math> , and the effective resistance R for each IRS element; that can improve the reflection coefficient and, hence, the system performance. The system performance is assessed by investigating some important performance measures such as received power strength, signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), and the data rate with using different methods. It is shown that the transmitted power, the size of IRS, the access point (AP)-IRS horizontal distance, and the value of bandwidth have a major effect on IRS-aided wireless communication system performance. Also, it is shown that the power method results in the best data rate at the receiver among the different proposed methods.