Demystifying the Power Scaling Law of Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces and Metasurfaces

Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) have recently attracted the attention of communication theorists as a means to control the wireless propagation channel. It has been shown that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of a single-user IRS-aided transmission increases as N
²
, with N being the number of passive reflecting elements in the IRS. This has been interpreted as a major potential advantage of using IRSs, instead of conventional Massive MIMO (mMIMO) whose SNR scales only linearly in N. This paper shows that this interpretation is incorrect. We first prove analytically that mMIMO always provides higher SNRs, and then show numerically that the gap is substantial; a very large number of reflecting elements is needed for an IRS to obtain SNRs comparable to mMIMO.