Model-Driven GAN-Based Channel Modeling for IRS-Aided Wireless Communication

Abstract

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising new technology that is able to create a favorable wireless signal propagation environment by collaboratively reconfiguring the passive reflecting elements, yet with low hardware and energy cost. In IRS-aided wireless communication systems, channel modeling is a fundamental task for communication algorithm design and performance optimization, which however is also very challenging since in-depth domain knowledge and technical expertise in radio signal propagations are required, especially for modeling the high-dimensional cascaded base station (BS)-IRS and IRS-user channels (also referred to as the reflected channels). In this paper, we propose a model-driven generative adversarial network (GAN)-based channel modeling framework to autonomously learn the reflected channel distribution, without complex theoretical analysis or data processing. The designed GAN (also named as IRS-GAN) is trained to reach the Nash equilibrium of a minimax game between a generative model and a discriminative model, where the special structure of the reflected channels is incorporated to improve the modeling accuracy. Simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed IRS-GAN framework for IRS-related channel modeling.