Capacity Boosting by IRS Deployment for industrial IoT Communication in cm -and mm-Wave Bands

This paper investigates a deployment of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) in a scenario of industrial IoT communication, characterized by data transmission with high reliability under low latency constraints. In this scenario, channel diversity from independent radio links is of supreme importance, which can be enriched by IRS assisted links. By first dimensioning the size of the IRS to fulfill the far-field conditions for the carrier frequency used, the path-loss of the IRS assisted links is modeled based on the 3GPP path-loss models for indoor factories. An analysis of the achievable effective capacity is carried out for selected carrier frequencies in the cm- and mm-wave bands, where it is shown that the IRS deployment can yield significant capacity gains compared to the baseline without IRS.