Multi-user Scheduling in Controlled Wireless Environments

Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces (IRSs) have achieved significant research attention due to their ability to provide a controlled wireless channel. We study several aspects of multiuser scheduling in such systems. Due to the large number of IRS elements that need to be controlled, the size of the search space involved in arriving at an optimal configuration of the IRS elements increases exponentially with the number of elements involved. This paper shares our approach to study such systems and the various trade-offs involved. We provide a genetic algorithm-based heuristic approach to obtain the near-optimal configuration (we have not proved the near-optimality of the approach). In this paper, we explicitly account for the modulation and coding scheme impact on the target received SNR. We also propose a multi-user scheduling approach in an IRS-assisted system using MCS.