Intelligent Reflecting Surface Enhanced Wireless Communications With Deep-Learning-Based Channel Prediction

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce channel prediction to wireless communications aided by intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in order to reduce the overhead brought by full channel estimation. Hopefully, fine-grained control of reflection coefficients on IRS can still be maintained with sufficiently accurate channel prediction. Innovatively, we consider channel prediction as an analogy to image super-resolution in computer vision since elements on an IRS are normally two-dimensionally arranged, which makes the popular deep learning techniques efficient solution. To this end, we first solve the element control problem via semi-definite relaxation (SDR) and then design an end-to-end deep-learning model for channel prediction. With estimation for only part of the entire channel state information (CSI), the total channel estimation overhead can be significantly reduced. We visually show that the purposed deep-learning model maintains considerably high accuracy for channel prediction, which makes the proposed channel-prediction method outperforms the existing group-based method in terms of achievable rate. Moreover, the tradeoff between channel estimation overhead and channel prediction accuracy is also investigated with numerical results.