School of Engineering, University of British Columbia, Kelowna, BC V1V1V7, Canada.
Sensors (Basel). 2022 Nov 27;22(23):9229. doi: 10.3390/s22239229.
Passive technologies, including intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS), are gaining traction thanks to their ability to enhance communication systems while maintaining minimal cost and low complexity. They can assist a wireless sensor network (WSN) by achieving low power requirements for sensors and aid communication needs in many applications, for instance, environmental monitoring. In this paper, we propose an IRS-equipped WSN which describes sensors equipped with IRSs instead of active radio frequency (RF) electronics. The IRS sensor node (ISN) intercepts a dedicated signal from a power source such as a base station (BS) and modulates the transmission of that signal to an intended recipient. In order to enable multiple sensors to transmit to the receiver, we study opportunistic scheduling (OS) utilizing multi-sensor diversity while considering blind IRS operation, and compare it with round-robin (RR), proportional fairness (PF), and a theoretical upper bound. We study the effect of the choice of the number of IRS elements and number of ISNs on the average throughput of the system under OS. Finally, we provide pertinent comparisons for the different scheduling schemes and IRS configurations under relevant system performance metrics, highlighting different scenarios in which each scheme performs better.
被动技术，包括智能反射面（IRS），由于其能够在保持低成本和低复杂度的同时增强通信系统，因此越来越受到关注。它们可以通过为传感器实现低功率要求并满足许多应用中的通信需求，例如环境监测，来帮助无线传感器网络（WSN）。在本文中，我们提出了一种配备 IRS 的 WSN，其中描述了配备 IRS 的传感器，而不是有源射频（RF）电子设备。IRS 传感器节点（ISN）从基站（BS）等电源接收专用信号，并调制该信号的传输到预期的接收方。为了使多个传感器能够传输到接收器，我们研究了利用多传感器多样性的机会调度（OS），同时考虑了盲目 IRS 操作，并将其与轮询（RR）、比例公平（PF）和理论上限进行了比较。我们研究了在 OS 下，IRS 元素数量和 ISN 数量的选择对系统平均吞吐量的影响。最后，我们根据相关系统性能指标，对不同的调度方案和 IRS 配置进行了相关比较，突出了每种方案在不同场景下的优势。
