Joint Location and Communication Study for Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Wireless Communication System

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is a novel burgeoning concept, which possesses advantages in enhancing wireless communication and user localization, while maintaining low hardware cost and energy consumption. Herein, we establish an IRS-aided mmWave-MIMO based joint localization and communication system (IMM-JLCS), and probe into its performance evaluation and optimization design. Specifically, first, we provide the signal, channel and estimation error models, and contrive the working process of the IMM-JLCS in detail. Then, by configuring appropriate IRS phase shifts, we derive the closed-form expressions of the Cramer-Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) of the position/orientation estimation errors and the effective achievable data rate (EADR), with respect to the time allocation ratio of the beam alignment and localization stage (BALS). Subsequently, we investigate the trade-off between the two performance metrics, for which we propose a joint optimization algorithm. Finally, we carry out simulations and comparisons to view the trade-off and validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, in the presence of distinct levels of estimation uncertainty and user mobility. Our results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can find the joint optimal solution for the position/orientation estimation accuracy and EADR, with its optimization performance being robust to slight localization or channel estimation errors and user mobility.