Joint Power Control and Passive Beamforming in Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Multi-Cell Uplink Communications

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is advanced as an effective technology to meet the high requirements of frequency spectrum and energy efficiency (EE) in future wireless communication systems, which can dynamically adjust its reflecting elements to control the incident signal and change the signal transmission path, thus improve the channel transmission environment. The prior works on IRS mostly considered the uplink scenarios with single cell, which however, did not address the issue of co-channel interference between different cells. This paper investigates an uplink wireless communication system with single IRS serving multiple cells with multiple users (UEs). The transmit power of users and the phase shifts of IRS are jointly optimized for maximizing the system throughput. The resulting non-convex optimization problem is solved by a heuristic algorithm, in which we exploit a non-cooperative game algorithm to solve the co-channel interference dilemma. Presented simulation results illustrate that the proposed scheme achieves a better performance in both system throughput and EE than other baseline algorithms.