Multi-Beam Multi-Hop Routing for Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces Aided Massive MIMO

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is envisioned to play a significant role in future wireless communication systems as an effective means of reconfiguring the radio signal propagation environment. In this paper, we study a new multi-IRS aided massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, where a multi-antenna BS transmits independent messages to a set of remote single-antenna users using orthogonal beams that are subsequently reflected by different groups of IRSs via their respective multi-hop passive beamforming over pairwise line-of-sight (LoS) links. We aim to select optimal IRSs and their beam routing path for each of the users, along with the active/passive beamforming at the BS/IRSs, such that the minimum received signal power among all users is maximized. This problem is particularly difficult to solve due to a new type of path separation constraints for avoiding the IRS-reflected signal induced interference among different users. To tackle this difficulty, we first derive the optimal BS/IRS active/passive beamforming solutions based on their practical codebooks given the reflection paths. Then we show that the resultant multi-beam multi-hop routing problem can be recast as an equivalent graph-optimization problem, which is however NP-complete. To solve this challenging problem, we propose an efficient recursive algorithm to partially enumerate the feasible routing solutions, which is able to effectively balance the performance-complexity trade-off. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves near-optimal performance with low complexity and outperforms other benchmark schemes. Useful insights into the optimal multi-beam multi-hop routing design are also drawn under different setups of the multi-IRS aided massive MIMO network.