Transforming Fading Channel From Fast to Slow: Intelligent Refracting Surface Aided High-Mobility Communication

Intelligent reflecting/refracting surface (IRS) has recently emerged as a promising solution to reconfigure wireless propagation environment for enhancing the communication performance by tuning passive signal reflection or refraction. In this paper, we study a new IRS-aided high-mobility communication system by employing the intelligent
refracting
surface with a high-speed vehicle to aid its passenger’s communication with a remote base station (BS). Due to the environment’s random scattering and vehicle’s high mobility, a rapidly time-varying channel is typically resulted between the static BS and fast-moving IRS/user, which renders the channel estimation for IRS with a large number of passive refracting elements more challenging, as compared to that for the conventional slow fading IRS channels with low-mobility users. In order to reap the high IRS passive beamforming gain with low channel training overhead, we propose a new and efficient two-stage transmission protocol to achieve both IRS channel estimation and refraction optimization for data transmission. Specifically, by exploiting the quasi-static channel between the IRS and user both moving at the same high speed as well as the line-of-sight (LoS) dominant channel between the BS and IRS, the user first estimates the LoS component of the cascaded BS-IRS-user channel in Stage I, based on which IRS passive refraction is designed to maximize the corresponding IRS-refracted channel gain. Then, the user estimates the resultant IRS-refracted channel as well as the non-IRS-refracted channel in Stage II for setting an additional common phase shift at all IRS refracting elements so as to align these two channels for maximizing the overall channel gain for data transmission. Simulation results show that the proposed design can efficiently achieve the full IRS passive beamforming gain in the high-mobility communication scenario, which also converts the overall BS-user channel from fast to slow fading for more reliable transmission. The proposed on-vehicle IRS system is further compared with a baseline scheme of deploying fixed IRSs (intelligent reflecting surfaces) on the roadside to assist high-speed vehicular communications, which achieves significant rate improvement due to its greatly saved channel training time.