What is the rate of IRS usage with wireless networks in the world now?

Dear Abbas Thajeel Alsahlanee ,

Applying IRS to control the physical wireless channel may take some time to mature the technology. The intelligent surfaces need channel sate information about the existing channels between sources and destinations. Since source positions are known which is the base station location, then one have to provide a map of the channel state information. One has to locate the main sources of wireless attenuation and scattering. Then one can propose possible effective locations to install the IRS. After which one has to program the IRS to enhance the transmission between the source and destination. As we see it is not an easy to apply solution. There is exist a powerful equalization methods either as precoding or decoding.

My experience is so long an easier solutions exists this will delay the introduction of more complicated technology for system enhancements.

Best wishes

Telecom operators need to have an important use case to find a reason to invest in this technology, which is already in its infancy. IRS is essentially a new category of relays with different characteristics than conventional relays, thus one has to identify good use cases. This hasn't been done yet. We are discussing this in a recent overview paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.03377.pdf

I think mmWave/THz communication is a promising use case of IRSs. This is because THz links are extremely susceptible to blockage, and hence an IRS can be exploited to provide beyond LoS communication.

For more information about the specifics of THz IRSs, you can check:

One of the EU projects that are investigating this topic is ARIADNE-ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AIDED D-BAND NETWORK FOR 5G LONG TERM EVOLUTION (https://www.researchgate.net/project/ARIADNE-ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE-AIDED-D-BAND-NETWORK-FOR-5G-LONG-TERM-EVOLUTION and https://www.ict-ariadne.eu/)

In ARIADNE project, we investigate both indoor and outdoor usage scenarios, which are empowered by IRSs. Some indicative publications are:

[1]

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Yes, IRS can be deployed to enhance security in communication networks to either replace legacy security solutions or supplement them.

Kindly, see the link: