IRS Empowered Interference Utilization for Efficient Data Transmission

With the increasing number of wireless devices connecting to networks and sharing the same spectrum resources, interference has become a significant obstacle to improving network performance. Existing interference management (IM) methods treat interference as a negative factor and mainly focus on suppressing or eliminating its impact on desired transmissions. However, this often comes at the cost of consuming communication resources. Therefore, design of low-cost IM method that can exploit interference is of research importance. To achieve this goal, we leverage the cost-effectiveness and adaptable deployment capabilities of Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS) to propose an IRS Empowered Interference Utilization (IRS-IU) method to realize efficient desired data transmission. By appropriately designing the reflection coefficient of the IRS, a phase shift is introduced to the incident interference, allowing the reflecting interference to interact with its direct counterpart at the interfered receiver (Rx). As a result, the interfered Rx can retrieve its desired data from the mixed interference. In this way, IRS-IU can make full use of the interference to enhance the desired data transmission. Our theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed method can significantly improve the spectral efficiency (SE) of the interfered communication-pair.