Optimal Path Selection in Cascaded Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces

Metasurfaces constitute a revolutionary technology for the realization of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS) which can alleviate the blockage problem in mmWave and Thz communications in the absence of Line of Sight (LOS). In this work, we consider the use of multiple IRSs to provide LOS paths between a sender and a receiver via reflection. Unlike previous work, we use the directivity as a means to incorporate the metasurface reflection behavior in the channel model and parameterize with respect to the design parameters. The design problem considered is the choice of the "best" IRSs for consecutive reflection of the transmitted signal to optimize the communication channel. The problem is formulated as an optimization problem which is challenging to solve due to the dependence of each link cost on the previous link. We consider a relaxation which decouples the link costs, we apply Dijkstra's algorithm for the solution and we show that the performance degradation as compared to the original problem which is solved using exhaustive search is not significant.