Intelligent Reflecting Surface Assisted Terahertz Communications Toward 6G

Terahertz (THz) communications have emerged as a promising candidate to support the heavy data traffic and exploding network capacity in future 6G wireless networks. However, THz face many challenges for practical implementation, such propagation loss, signal blockage, hardware cost. In this article, an emerging paradigm of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted is analyzed address above issues by leveraging joint active passive beamforming enhance communication quality reduce overhead. Aimed at overview currently available approaches realizing active/passive beam steering transmitter IRS presented. Based on these approaches, training strategy establishing then investigated communications. Moreover, various appealing scenarios that integrate into are envisioned. Open research directions new finally highlighted.