Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Aided Wireless Energy and Information Transmission: An Overview

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a promising technology for achieving spectrum and energy-efficient wireless networks cost-effectively. Most existing works on IRS have focused exploiting to enhance the performance of communication or information transmission (WIT), while its potential boosting efficiency radio frequency (RF) energy (WET) still remains largely open. Although IRS-aided WET shares similar characteristics with WIT, they differ fundamentally in terms design objective, receiver architecture, practical constraints, so on. In this article, we provide tutorial overview how efficiently systems as well both WIT WET, namely, simultaneous power transfer (SWIPT) powered network (WPCN), from signal processing perspective. particular, present state-of-the-art solutions tackle unique challenges operating these systems, such passive reflection optimization, channel estimation, deployment. addition, propose new solution approaches point out important directions future research investigation.