Over-the-Air Computation via Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces

Abstract

Over-the-air computation (AirComp) becomes a promising approach for fast wireless data aggregation via exploiting the superposition property in a multiple access channel. To further overcome the unfavorable signal propagation conditions for AirComp, in this paper, we propose an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided AirComp system to build controllable wireless environments, thereby boosting the received signal power significantly. This is achieved by smartly tuning the phase shifts for the incoming electromagnetic waves at IRS, resulting in reconfigurable signal propagations. Unfortunately, it turns out that the joint design problem for AirComp transceivers and IRS phase shifts becomes a highly intractable nonconvex bi-quadratic programming problem, for which a novel alternating difference-of-convex (DC) programming algorithm is developed. This is achieved by providing a novel DC function representation for the rank-one constraint in the low-rank matrix optimization problem via matrix lifting. Simulation results demonstrate the algorithmic advantages and admirable performance of the proposed approaches compared with the state-of-art solutions.