Impact of Finite-Resolution Precoding and Limited Feedback on Rates of IRS Based mmWave Networks

Abstract

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) can enhance the system performance of millimeter wave (mmWave) networks. In practice, phase shifts at the base station and the IRSs are digitally controlled and have discrete values. The channel state information (CSI) feedback also has a limited rate. This work analyzes the spectral efficiency performance of an IRS based mmWave network in which the beamsteering codebooks are used for the passive precoding and analog precoding, and the zero-forcing precoder is used for digital precoding. To capture the features of mmWave channels and reflect the impact of passive and analog precoding, a channel correlation based codebook is employed to quantize the effective channels. Upper-bounds are derived for the spectral efficiency losses due to finite-resolution beamsteering codebooks and limited CSI feedback. It is found that the spectral efficiency loss due to finite-resolution beamsteering codebooks does not depend on the transmit power in large signal-to-noise ratio regimes, while the spectral efficiency loss due to limited CSI feedback increases with the transmit power. Then, the asymptotic performance is analyzed when the numbers of transmit antenna elements and reflecting elements go to infinity. Simulations verify the derivations and findings.