Design of a Scalable IRS-Assisted Communication System with Generalized Beamforming Approach

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) are envisaged to be a prominent part of the next-generation communication networks. To exploit the benefits of the IRS, beamforming is indispensable. In this work, we propose a generalized beamforming algorithm for an IRS-based wireless system, along with the design of a hardware prototype to implement it. The algorithm is versatile enough to be deployed on an IRS array of arbitrary size with unit cells that have any number of discrete phase shifts. A prototype is designed with an array of single-bit phase shifting unit cells and a peripheral control circuit to demonstrate beamforming using the proposed algorithm.