Performance Comparison Between Intelligent Reflecting Surface and Decode-and-Forward Full-Duplex Relaying

Recently, intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has been proposed and drawn significant research interests as a promising technique to enhance wireless communication performance. Since IRS technology is similar to the well-known relaying technology, it is necessary to compare the performance of the two different schemes. In this paper, we compare the IRS technology with classic decode-and-forward (DF) full-duplex relaying (FDR) from the perspective of spectrum efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE). The analysis and simulation results show that IRS-assisted transmission outperforms DF-FDR-assisted transmission with a very large number of reflecting elements.