Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has drawn a lot of attention recently as
a promising new solution to achieve high spectral and energy efficiency for
future wireless networks. By utilizing massive low-cost passive reflecting
elements, the wireless propagation environment becomes controllable and thus
can be made favorable for improving the communication performance. Prior works
on IRS mainly rely on the instantaneous channel state information (I-CSI),
which, however, is practically difficult to obtain for IRS-associated links due
to its passive operation and large number of elements. To overcome this
difficulty, we propose in this paper a new two-timescale (TTS) transmission
protocol to maximize the achievable average sum-rate for an IRS-aided multiuser
system under the general correlated Rician channel model. Specifically, the
passive IRS phase-shifts are first optimized based on the statistical CSI
(S-CSI) of all links, which varies much slowly as compared to their I-CSI,
while the transmit beamforming/precoding vectors at the access point (AP) are
then designed to cater to the I-CSI of the users' effective channels with the
optimized IRS phase-shifts, thus significantly reducing the channel training
overhead and passive beamforming complexity over the existing schemes based on
the I-CSI of all channels. For the single-user case, a novel penalty dual
decomposition (PDD)-based algorithm is proposed, where the IRS phase-shifts are
updated in parallel to reduce the computational time. For the multiuser case,
we propose a general TTS optimization algorithm by constructing a quadratic
surrogate of the objective function, which cannot be explicitly expressed in
closed-form. Simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of
our proposed algorithms and evaluate the impact of S-CSI and channel
correlation on the system performance.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions
on Wireless Communication