Power-Measurement-Based Channel Autocorrelation Estimation for IRS-Assisted Wideband Communications

Channel state information (CSI) is essential to the performance optimization of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided wireless communication systems. However, the passive and frequency-flat reflection of IRS, as well as the high-dimensional IRS-reflected channels, have posed practical challenges for efficient IRS channel estimation, especially in wideband communication systems with significant multi-path channel delay spread. To tackle the above challenge, we propose a novel neural network (NN)-empowered IRS channel estimation and passive reflection design framework for the wideband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) communication system based only on the user’s reference signal received power (RSRP) measurements with time-varying random IRS training reflections. As RSRP is readily accessible in existing communication systems, our proposed channel estimation method does not require additional pilot transmission in IRS-aided wideband communication systems. In particular, we show that the average received signal power over all OFDM subcarriers at the user terminal can be represented as the prediction of a single-layer NN composed of multiple subnetworks with the same structure, such that the autocorrelation matrix of the wideband IRS channel can be recovered as their weights via supervised learning. To exploit the potential sparsity of the channel autocorrelation matrix, a progressive training method is proposed by gradually increasing the number of subnetworks until a desired accuracy is achieved, thus reducing the training complexity. Based on the estimates of IRS channel autocorrelation matrix, the IRS passive reflection is then optimized to maximize the average channel power gain over all subcarriers. Numerical results indicate the effectiveness of the proposed IRS channel autocorrelation matrix estimation and passive reflection design under wideband channels, which can achieve significant performance improvement compared to the existing IRS reflection designs based on user power measurements.