Multi-cell mMIMO IRS Systems With Impairments and Aging: Phase Optimization and Receiver Design

We consider the uplink of a hardware-impaired intelligent reflective surfaces (IRS) aided multi-cell massive multiple-input multiple-output (mMIMO) system with mobile user equipments, whose channel age with time. For this system, we analyze the distortion due to hardware impairments, and the effect of channel aging, and propose a novel distortion-and-aging-aware MMSE (DAA-MMSE) receiver that not only provides a higher spectral efficiency (SE) than conventional maximal ratio and distortion-unaware MMSE (DU-MMSE) receivers, but also reduces the pilot overhead. By considering non-ideal hardware and spatially-correlated Rician fading channels with phase shifts, we also derive the SE lower bound for this system. We show that the SE gain of the DAA-MMSE receiver over DU-MMSE receiver increases with hardware impairments, and channel aging. Along with DAA-MMSE receiver, the IRS is also shown to reduce the pilot overhead in a mMIMO system with channel aging.
Comment: This paper is accepted in WCNC 2025