Passive Reflection Optimization for IRS-Aided Multicast Beamforming With Discrete Phase Shifts

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) can bring promising advantages to enhance the communication system performance by reconfiguring wireless channels dynamically. The design of passive IRS reflection has attracted high attention and most existing works have considered continuous phase shift for IRS reflection. However, this is difficult to realize in practice due to hardware limitations and discrete phase shifts are applied for practical IRSs instead. In this letter, the information multicast beamforming problem in an IRS-aided multi-user system is considered, where the minimum receive signal-to-noise-ratio among the users is maximized by optimizing the IRS reflections with discrete phase shifts. By leveraging semi-definite relaxation (SDR) and gradient descent/ascent (GDA), two solutions are presented with high/low computational complexity, respectively. Simulation results show the efficacy of the proposed GDA-based algorithm as compared to the SDR-based and other benchmark schemes.