Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces: Physics, Propagation, and Pathloss Modeling

This is a code package is related to the follow scientific article:

Özgecan Özdogan, Emil Björnson, Erik G. Larsson, “Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces: Physics, Propagation, and Pathloss Modeling,” IEEE Wireless Communications Letters, to appear.

The package contains a simulation environment, based on Matlab, that reproduces some of the numerical results and figures in the article. We encourage you to also perform reproducible research!

Abstract of Article

Intelligent reflecting surfaces can improve the communication between a source and a destination. The surface contains metamaterial that is configured to “reflect” the incident wave from the source towards the destination. Two incompatible pathloss models have been used in prior work. In this letter, we derive the far-field pathloss using physical optics techniques and explain why the surface consists of many elements that individually act as diffuse scatterers but can jointly beamform the signal in a desired direction with a certain beamwidth. We disprove one of the previously conjectured pathloss models.

Content of Code Package

The article contains 4 simulation figures, numbered 2, 3, 4 and 5. plotFigure2.m generates Figure 2, plotFigure3.m generates Figure 3, plotFigure4.m generates Figure 4, and plotFigure5.m generates Figure 5. There is also a function quant.m that is used by ths scripts.

See each file for further documentation.

Acknowledgements

The paper was supported by ELLIIT and the Swedish Research Council.

License and Referencing

This code package is licensed under the GPLv2 license. If you in any way use this code for research that results in publications, please cite our original article listed above.