Dr Shuowen Zhang won the IEEE Communications Society Best Tutorial Paper Award 2023 for her paper “Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Wireless Communications: A Tutorial” published on IEEE Transactions on Communications! The award recognizes the best tutorial paper published in any IEEE Communications Society magazine or journal in the previous five calendar years. Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is an enabling technology to engineer the radio signal propagation in wireless networks. By smartly tuning the signal reflection via a large number of low-cost passive reflecting elements, IRS is capable of dynamically altering wireless channels to enhance the communication performance. It is thus expected that the new IRS-aided hybrid wireless network comprising both active and passive components will be highly promising to achieve a sustainable capacity growth cost-effectively in the future. Despite its great potential, IRS faces new challenges to be efficiently integrated into wireless networks, such as reflection optimization, channel estimation, and deployment from communication design perspectives. Dr Zhang provides a tutorial overview of IRS-aided wireless communications to address the above issues, and elaborate its reflection and channel models, hardware architecture and practical constraints, as well as various appealing applications in wireless networks. Important directions worthy of further investigation in future work are also highlighted in this winning paper.
