6G-Powered Efficient Resource Control through IRS-UE Association

The widespread popularity of live streaming, cloud gaming, mobile video streaming, and many real-time applications relies on high-speed data to ensure low latency and seamless user experience. This large high-speed data demand has led to the development of next-generation or sixth-generation (6G) communication technology. It aims to offer high-speed communication support to multiple applications and interactive services simultaneously. But the vulnerability of node communication to the changing propagation environment often leads to call drops, data loss, and high latency. This paper presents a 6G-enabled wireless network that makes use of multiple intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). The distributed IRSs enhance the robustness of transmission but the increased overhead owing to multiple IRSs is the main challenge. To overcome this, efficient resource control is introduced, which associates sets of IRSs to user equipment (UE). An algorithm, namely IUABP (IRS-UE association based on pilots), is proposed; it offers selective resource control. Furthermore, the performance of the distributed IRS system is evaluated based on the achievable sum rate for different IRS numbers, reflecting elements, and transmit powers. We observed that the proposed association scheme offers an improvement of 30% in the achieved sum rate using N = 50 and R = 5 at a transmit power of 12 dBm. We also discuss the comparison with two other association schemes, namely, distance-based association and random association.