Dual-polarized IRS-assisted wireless network: relative phase modulation

The metasurface is a promising technology that can help next-generation wireless communication systems not only improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), but also increase security and mitigate interference. Further, introducing dual polarization (DP) in a metasurface can enhance its capabilities with polarization diversity, polarization multiplexing, and polarization-switched modulation. In this paper, we study a DP-metasurface-assisted single-user wireless communication system and propose a novel scheme that can improve the spectral efficiency (SE) and bit-error-rate (BER) performance compared to those of conventional schemes by exploiting the orthogonal property of dual-polarized waves. We employ the DP metasurface to increase the SNR at the receiver and create a specific phase difference between the polarized signals by controlling the transmit precoder and the phases of the metasurface reflecting elements representing some modulated bits. At the receiver, we use the recovered phase information to realign the modulated symbols in both polarizations, which are then added coherently. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves significantly higher SE and BER performance than those of some closely related works.