The rate and energy efficiency of wireless channels can be improved by deploying software-controlled metasurfaces to reflect signals from the source to the destination, especially when the direct path is weak. While previous works mainly optimized the reflections, this letter compares the new technology with classic decode-and-forward (DF) relaying. The main observation is that very high rates and/or large metasurfaces are needed to outperform DF relaying, both in terms of minimizing the total transmit power and maximizing the energy efficiency, which also includes the dissipation in the transceiver hardware.
@article{arxiv.1906.03949,
title = {Intelligent Reflecting Surface vs. Decode-and-Forward: How Large Surfaces Are Needed to Beat Relaying?},
author = {Emil Björnson and Özgecan Özdogan and Erik G. Larsson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.03949},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
Published in IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, 5 pages, 5 figures. This version corrects a typo in Proposition 3, which also affected Figure 5. Please refer to 10.1109/LWC.2024.3453787 for additional clarification