mmWave Doubly-Massive-MIMO Communications Enhanced With an Intelligent Reflecting Surface: Asymptotic Analysis

As a means to control wireless propagation environments, the use of emerging and novel intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) is envisioned to enhance and broaden many applications in future wireless networks. This paper is concerned with an IRS-assisted millimeter-wave (mmWave) system in which the IRS consists of multiple subsurfaces, each having the same number of passive reflecting elements, whereas both the transmitter and receiver are equipped with massive antenna arrays. Under the scenario of having very large numbers of antennas at both transmit and receive ends, the achievable rate of the system is derived. Furthermore, with the objective of maximizing the achievable rate, the paper presents optimal solutions of power allocation, precoding/combining, and IRS's phase shifts. Then it is shown that when the number of reflecting elements at each subsurface is very large, the number of favorable and controllable propagation paths provided by the IRS is simply equal to the number of subsurfaces while the received signal-to-noise ratio corresponding to each of the favorable paths increases quadratically with the number of reflecting elements. The problem of minimizing the transmit power subject to the rate constraint is also analyzed for the scenario without direct paths in the pure LOS propagation. In addition, the asymptotic analysis is extended to the multiuser scenario. Finally, numerical results are provided to corroborate the obtained analysis.