IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 25, NO.
7, JULY 2021
Fairness-Aware Multiuser Scheduling for Finite-Resolution Intelligent
Reflecting Surface-Assisted Communication
Dong Li , Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract— This letter investigates multiuser scheduling for
finite-resolution intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted com-
munication systems with fairness guarantee. Different from
previous works, we consider the interference-free transmission
among multiple users, and propose a new phase shift scheme
referred to as hybrid phase shift (HPS), which generalizes the
conventional coherent phase shift (CPS) and random phase shift
(RPS) and makes a tradeoff between the capacity performance
and the feedback overhead for the channel phase information
(CPI). Our goal is to maximize the minimum ergodic capacity
among multiple users subject to the transmission time constraint.
However, it does not admit an exact closed-form expression for
the ergodic capacity in the proposed HPS, where its approxima-
tion is obtained to facilitate the time allocation. To shed light
on the practical design, the number of reflecting elements that
can guarantee a given capacity performance gap between CPS
and HPS is investigated. Simulation results show the tightness
of derived ergodic capacities, and demonstrate the capacity-
feedback tradeoff for the proposed HPS.
Index Terms— Intelligent reflecting surface, hybrid phase shift,
ergodic capacity, time allocation.
I. I NTRODUCTION
I NTELLIGENT reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a
promising technology to enhance the spectrum and energy
efficiency of communication systems, and is capable of reduc-
ing the hardware cost incurred by active radio frequency (RF)
chains. The IRS is composed of a number of reconfigurable
reflecting elements, and the phase of each element is controlled
by integrated electronics in a software defined manner (see,
e.g., [1], [2]). The fairness issue in the IRS-assisted multiuser
communication has recently attracted considerable attention.
For instance, the proportional fairness was addressed in [3],
and the max-min fairness was considered in [4]–[6]. However,
multiple users were assumed to work on the concurrent trans-
mission mode, and thus multiuser interference among them
was inevitable. On the other hand, most of existing works
focus on how to obtain the optimal/sub-optimal phase shift
for performance enhancement (see, e.g., [7]–[10]). However,
the feedback overhead for the channel phase information (CPI)
increases significantly particularly when the number of reflect-
ing elements becomes large. Besides, the CPI was assumed to
be continuous, which, however, may not be attainable due to
the finite-resolution of the IRS.
Manuscript received February 5, 2021; revised March 12, 2021; accepted
April 11, 2021. Date of publication April 15, 2021; date of current version
July 10, 2021. The work of Dong Li was supported in part by The Science and
Technology Development Fund, Macau SAR, under Grant 0003/2019/A1, and
in part by the Joint Research Funding Project launched by the Ministry of Sci-
ence and Technology of the People’s Republic of China and The Science and
Technology Development Fund, Macau SAR, under Grant 0018/2019/AMJ.
The associate editor coordinating the review of this letter and approving it for
publication was C. Pan.
The author is with the Faculty of Information Technology, Macau University
of Science and Technology, Macau 999078, China (e-mail: dli@must.edu.mo).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LCOMM.2021.3073353
1558-2558 © 2021 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
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2395
Motivated by the above observations, in this letter, we inves-
tigate and analyze multiuser scheduling for finite-resolution
IRS-assisted communication systems, where the total transmis-
sion time duration is divided into multiple time slots and each
user is scheduled for transmission within the allocated time
slot to avoid the multiuser interference. Different from existing
works where coherent phase shift (CPS) is adopted, a hybrid
phase shift (HPS) scheme is proposed, which incorporates
CPS and random phase shift (RPS) as two special cases
and is thus more general. By doing so, the close-to-optimal
performance is attainable but with reduced feedback overhead
for the CPI. Our goal is to maximize the minimum ergodic
capacity with HPS among multiple users subject to the total
transmission time constraint. However, the ergodic capacity
in the proposed HPS is difficult to obtain, which makes the
optimization problem hard to solve. In order to circumvent this
problem, an approximation for the ergodic capacity is derived
to facilitate the time allocation. In order to shed light on the
practical design, the number of reflecting elements that can
guarantee a given capacity performance gap due to the partial
CPI in the HPS is investigated and derived in a closed-form
expression. Simulation results verify the tightness of derived
ergodic capacities, and demonstrate the tradeoff between the
capacity performance and the feedback overhead in the HPS.
Notations: Boldface lowercase letters are used to denote
vectors, and the superscript (·)T and (·)∗ stand for the trans-
pose and the conjugate operation. E(·) represents the statistical
expectation, and Var(·) denotes the variance. CN (0, δ 2 ) is the
complex Gaussian distribution with zero mean and variance
δ 2 . | · | and [·]i denote the absolute value and the i-th element
of a vector. log(·) denotes the natural logarithm, and E1 (·)
denotes the exponential integral.
II. S YSTEM M ODEL AND H YBRID P HASE S HIFT
A. System Model
The system under consideration consists of one source
S, one IRS R with N reflecting elements, and K destina-
tions/users Dk for k = 1, 2, · · · , K. Both S and Dk are
equipped with a single antenna, and the direct link between S
and Dk is absent due to the obstruction as illustrated in Fig. 1.
Specifically, in Fig. 1, the transmission is divided into K
time slots, and S takes turns to send the signal of the k-th
user to Dk via R in the k-th time slot. hSR ∈ C N ×1 and
hRDk ∈ C N ×1 denote channel coefficients between S and R,
R and Dk . Besides, dSR and dRDk denote distances pertaining
to hSR and hRDk ,1 and β is the path loss factor. hSR and
hRDk are further assumed to be respectively distributed as
CN (0, d−β −β
SR ) and CN (0, dRDk ) in an elementwise manner. Let
1 It is assumed that the size of reflecting elements is small compared with
the distances between reflecting elements and S/Dk , so that the distances
between reflecting elements and S/Dk can be safely assumed to be the same.
 2396 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 25, NO. 7, JULY 2021

be reduced by decreasing M . Thus, the proposed HPS has the

potential to significantly improve the capacity performance but
with reduced feedback overhead, which will be examined in
simulation results. Besides, the feedback overhead reduction
can be simply achieved by randomly choosing M coherent
phases in the proposed HPS, which is easy to be implemented.
This is in contrast to [12] where the optimization of the feed-
back overhead is involved. It is also noted that the proposed
HPS can be reduced to the conventional CPS as in [11] by
setting M = N or the RPS by deleting Ω1 . Thus, the proposed
HPS is more general than the conventional CPS and RPS.
In the proposed HPS, the received signal at Dk in the k-th
time slot in (1)
 can be rewritten as
√
Fig. 1. System model for the IRS-assisted system. yDk = ρ P |[hSR ]i ||[hRDk ]i |ejΘi,k
  
i∈Ω1
with Full CPI
ρ ∈ (0, 1] and {ςi,k }Ni=1 denote the reflecting coefficient and 

phases, and Φk = ρdiag(ejφ1,k , ejφ2,k , · · · , ejφN,k ) denote the + [hSR ]i [hRDk ]i ej φ̃i,k sk + uDk , (2)
diagonal phase shift matrix of the IRS for the k-th user. Then,   
i∈Ω2
with No CPI
the received signal at Dk in the k-th time slot can be written as
√ where ςi,k in (1) is divided into two parts as mentioned earlier,
yDk = P hTRDk Φk hSR sk + uDk , which is replaced by ςopt i,k + Θi,k for i ∈ Ω1 in the CPI part
√ N
and ς̃i,k for i ∈ Ω2 in the no CPI part, respectively. In (2),
=ρ P [hSR ]i [hRDk ]i ejφi,k sk + uDk , (1) for the full CPI part, absolute values of hSR and hRDk are
i=1 involved due to ςopti,k + Θi,k , which is different from the no
where P and sk denote the transmit power and the transmitted CPI part. According to (2), the received signal-to-noise ratio
signal for Dk , and uDk ∼ CN (0, δ 2 ) is the additive white (SNR) for the k-th user is given by
Gaussian noise (AWGN) at Dk . ρ2 P 
HP S
γIRS,k = 2 | |[hSR ]i ||[hRDk ]i |ejΘi,k
δ
i∈Ω1
B. Hybrid Phase Shift 
It is well known that the optimal CPI for capacity maxi- + [hSR ]i [hRDk ]i ej φ̃i,k |2 , (3)
mization can be given by ςopt i,k = − arg([hSR ]i [hRDk ]i ) for
i∈Ω2

1 ≤ i ≤ N and 1 ≤ k ≤ K. The above CPI can be 2

where E(|sk | ) = 1 is assumed. The resulting ergodic capacity
obtained from the channel state information (CSI), which can is given by
be estimated by the traditional pilot-based method. Besides,
the CSI is assumed to be available at Dk , and the optimal
HP S
C̄IRS,k = E(log(1 + γIRS,k
HP S
)). (4)
CPI can be fed back to R. However, the feedback overhead
for the CPI will become huge particularly when N is large. III. T IME A LLOCATION FOR FAIR E RGODIC C APACITY
In order to solve this problem, in this letter, we consider a M AXIMIZATION
new phase shift scheme, which is referred to as HPS. In this In this section, we aim to maximize the minimum ergodic
scheme, only a part of arg([hSR ]i [hRDk ]i ) for 1 ≤ i ≤ N for capacity (measured in nats per Hertz) among K users subject
the k-th user is delivered to R. For simplicity of illustration, to the total transmission time constraint T .2
we respectively denote Ω1 = {1, 2, . . . , M } and Ω2 = {M +1,
M + 2, . . . , N } as the set consisting of full CPI and the set P1 : max HP S
min tk C̄IRS,k (5a)
tk 1≤k≤K
consisting of no CPI. On one hand, for Ω1 , although ςopt i,k with
i ∈ Ω1 is attainable, it will be quantized to discrete values 
K
b s.t. tk ≤ T, (5b)
{0, 2π2b
, · · · , (2 −1)2π
2b
} due to the finite-resolution nature of R, k=1
where b denotes the number of bits to represent 2b discrete val-
ues. The phase error for the i-th reflector element and the k-th where tk is the time slot that is allocated to the k-th user.3 It
user can be denoted as Θi,k , which represents the derivation of is noted that, although the max-min fairness was considered in
ςopt [4]–[6], which are, however, different from this work where the
i,k from the corresponding quantized phase and assumed to
interference-free multiuser scheduling was considered. Thus,
be within {−2−b π, 2−b π} (see, e.g., [11]). On the other hand,
the methods developed in [4]–[6] are not applicable here.
for Ω2 , since there is no CPI, the phase is randomly chosen
(2b −1)2π It should be also noted that, although |[hSR ]i | and |[hRDk ]i |
from the set of discrete values, i.e., {0, 2π 2b , · · · , 2b },
which is denoted as ς̃i,k for i ∈ Ω2 . 2 The CPI of M reflecting elements is assumed to be fed back to R

The advantage of the proposed HPS is that it can strike a
balance between the capacity performance and the feedback
overhead by adjusting M , where the capacity performance can
be enhanced by increasing M and the feedback overhead can
simultaneously instead of one-by-one feedback, and thus the feedback time
is fixed and irrespective of M . This is why T is irrespective of the feedback
time and M .
3 The time allocation process can be implemented either by a central
controller or S by collecting the global statistical CSI.

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 LI: FAIRNESS-AWARE MULTIUSER SCHEDULING FOR FINITE-RESOLUTION IRS-ASSISTED COMMUNICATION 2397

N
for i ∈ Ω1 follow the Rayleigh distribution, and [hSR ]i and In (10), it can be checked that i=1 [hSR ]i [hRDk ]i e
j φ̃i,k

[hRDk ]i i ∈ Ω2 follow the complex Gaussian distribution, follows the Gaussian distribution
no matter when N is
j φ̃i,k 2
HP S
C̄IRS,k does not admit an exact closed-form expression if not sufficiently large. Thus, | Ni=1 [hSR ]i [hRDk ]i e | follows
impossible, which renders P1 hard to solve. In order to make the exponential distribution with parameters N d−β −β
SR dRDk .
P1 tractable, we resort to the approximate ergodic capacity By using [13, (4.337.2)], we can arrive at (10). Based on (10),
for problem solving, which is summarized in the following the optimized time allocation for P1 in the RPS is given by
proposition. the following proposition.
4b−2 M(M−1) sin2 ( π
)
Proposition 1: When 2b
is sufficiently Proposition 3: The optimized time allocation for fair ergodic
N
large, the optimized time allocation for P1 is given by capacity maximization in the RPS is given by
1 1
2
log(1+ ρδ2P (N +4b−2 M(M−1) sin2 ( π
))d−β −β
SR dRD ))
2 2
tHP
k
S
= K 2b k
T. exp( N ρ2 P dδ−β d−β )E1 ( N ρ2 P dδ−β d−β )
1 SR RD SR RDk
k=1 2
log(1+ ρδ2P (N +4b−2 M(M−1) sin2 ( π
))d−β −β tRP S
= k
T.
SR dRD ))
k 1
2b k K
k=1 2 2
(6) exp( N ρ2 P dδ−β d−β )E1 ( N ρ2 P dδ−β d−β )
SR RDk SR RDk
Proof: See Appendix A. (11)
In Proposition 1, it is shown that the ergodic capacity of
the k-th user can be expressed as Proof: The proof is similar to Appendix A, and is thus
ρ2 P omitted for brevity.
HP S
C̄IRS,k ≈ log(1 + (N + 4b−2 M
δ2 IV. N UMERICAL R ESULTS
π
× (M − 1) sin2 ( b ))d−β −β
SR dRDk )). (7) In this section, the ergodic capacity performance is eval-
2 uated by computer simulations, where analytical results are
where details are given by Appendix A, and all users can respectively obtained by (7) for the proposed HPS, (7) with
be shown to share the same ergodic capacity in nats per M = N for the CPS and (10) for the RPS and simulation
Hertz. It can be also verified that, when dRDk is the same, results are averaging over 1000 independent runs. ρ = 1,
the optimized time allocation is reduced to the equal time K = 5, T = 1 s, P = 43 dBm and δ 2 = −100 dBm are
T
allocation, i.e., tHP S
=N . set. Furthermore, S, R and {Dk }K k=1 are located respectively
k
It is known that, due to the incomplete CPI, the ergodic at coordinates (0 m, 0 m), (50 m, 10 m), and (100 m, 0 m)
capacity in the proposed HPS is degraded if compared with with β = 4, where {Dk }K k=1 are assumed to be co-located for
that in the CPS. However, it is unclear whether it is possible simplicity of illustration.
to configure the IRS to maintain a given performance gap in Fig. 2(a) shows the impact of b on the capacity performance,
practice? In order to address this problem, we investigate the where N = 100 and M = 90 are set and Θi,k and ς̃i,k
impact of N , which is given by the following proposition. are randomly generated as defined previously. It is seen that
Proposition 2: The number of reflecting elements N that both the capacity performance of the CPS and the HPS can
guarantees the performance degradation within the rate thresh- be enhanced by increasing b, and becomes saturated when
old R due to the incomplete CPI in the HPS for the k-th user b ≥ 3. This is because the set of discrete phases becomes
should satisfy the following constraint small and the impact of phase errors is negligible in this case.
 

1 1 (eR − 1)δ 2 This is also the reason why there is almost no performance gap
N ≤ 1− √ M + √ . (8) between ergodic capacities for the CPS (or HPS) with/without
5 10ρ P d−β −β
SR dRDk phase errors. Besides, since there are no phase errors in the
Proof: See Appendix B. RPS, its capacity performance is invariant with b. Furthermore,
It is noted that it is desirable to consider (8) for practical the capacity performance of the proposed HPS can approach
design since (8) is irrelevant with the quantization phase errors that of the CPS within 0.1 nats/Hz but with reduced feed-
Θi,k for i ∈ Ω1 and randomly-chosen discrete phases ς̃i,k for back overhead for N − M = 10 reflecting elements, and
i ∈ Ω2 , and there is no need to acquire the instantaneous CSI significantly outperform that of the RPS. Finally, it is shown
in (8). that analytical and simulation results match well with each
For comparison, we also investigate the ergodic capacity in other, which indicates that the condition in Proposition 1 can
the RPS, which is given by be satisfied and verifies the correctness/tightness of derived
  
ρ2 P  approximated ergodic capacities.
N
j φ̃i,k 2
C̄IRS,k = E log 1 + 2 |
RP S
[hSR ]i [hRDk ]i e | . In Fig. 2(b) and (c), we fix b to be 5 and focus on the capac-
δ i=1 ity performance with phase errors by investigating the impact
(9) of M and N , respectively. Specifically, in Fig. 2(b) where N =
However, the exact closed-form expression for (9) is not 100, it is observed that the performance of the proposed HPS
attainable, and its approximation for sufficiently large N is can be significantly improved by increasing M as expected.
given by It is also observed that, even when M = 50, the performance
    gap between ergodic capacities between the CPS and the
δ2 δ2
C̄IRS,k ≈ exp
RP S
E1 . HPS is around 0.2 nats/Hz, which, however, significantly
N ρ2 P d−β −β
SR dRDk N ρ2 P d−β −β
SR dRDk decreases the feedback overhead by 50%. In Fig. 2(c), we keep
(10) M in a fixed proportion to N by taking M = 0.9N and

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 2398 IEEE COMMUNICATIONS LETTERS, VOL. 25, NO. 7, JULY 2021

Fig. 2. Comparison of ergodic capacities with CPS, HPS, and RPS.

M = 0.8N into account. It is seen that, when M/N is
fixed, the performance loss due to the incomplete CPI in the
proposed HPS is (almost) fixed for any given N . Besides, it is
shown in Fig. 2(c) that, the capacity of the proposed HPS
scales as log N , which can be verified by (7). Once again,
it is observed from Fig. 2(b) and (c) that there is a precise
agreement between analytical and simulation results.
In (12), (a) and (b) respectively follow from [11, (7)] and
b
[11, (9)], and E(cos Θ) = 2π sin( 2πb ) and E(sin Θ) = 0 for
Θ with uniform distribution on the interval {−2−bπ, 2−b π}.
In (13), the zero mean of [hSR ]i and [hRDk ]i and the sta-
tistical independence of channels are exploited. Furthermore,
HP S
by using (12) and (13), the mean of γIRS,k can be expressed
as

V. C ONCLUSION E(γIRS,k
HP S
)
  
ρ2 P π
This letter investigates interference-free multiuser schedul- = 2 N + 4b−2 M (M − 1) sin2 d−β −β
SR dRDk , (14)
ing for finite-resolution IRS-assisted communication systems, δ 2b
where ergodic capacity aided time allocation is proposed and
where the fact E(( i∈Ω1 |[hSR ]i ||[hRDk ]i |ejΘi,k )∗
analyzed. In particular, a new phase shift scheme referred j φ̃i,k
to as HPS is proposed, in which the ergodic capacity per- i∈Ω2 [hSR ]i [hRDk ]i e ) = 0 is exploited due to the
statistical independence of channels.
formance is contributed by both quantization phase errors in HP S
Next, C̄IRS,k can be re-expressed by using (14) as
the conventional CPS and randomly chosen discrete phases
in the RPS. The optimization problem is formulated as the HP S
C̄IRS,k = E(log(1 + E(γIRS,k
HP S
)))
ergodic capacity maximization with the total transmission   
HP S ))
=log(1+E(γIRS,k
time constraint by taking the max-min fairness into account.
  HP S 
In order to make the problem tractable, an approximate ergodic HP S
γIRS,k − E(γIRS,k )
capacity is derived to facilitate the time allocation for each + E log 1 + . (15)
1 + E(γIRS,k
HP S )
user in the proposed HPS. Besides, in order to shed light
γ HP S −E(γ HP S )
on the practical design, the number of reflecting elements It can be easily checked that IRS,k IRS,k
HP S ) has zero mean,
1+E(γIRS,k
that can guarantee the performance degradation within a and its variance can be given by
given rate threshold is derived. Simulation results confirm the  HPS HPS 
tightness of derived approximation for the ergodic capacity, γIRS,k − E(γIRS,k ) Var(γ HPS )
Var HPS
≤ (E(γ HPIRS,k
S ))2 . (16)
and the tradeoff between the ergodic capacity and the feedback 1 + E(γIRS,k ) IRS,k

overhead in the proposed HPS. HPS

In (16), Var(γIRS,k ) can be expressed as
A PPENDIX A (c) 2ρ P 2
4
   
HPS jΘi,k 2
P ROOF OF P ROPOSITION 1 Var(γIRS,k ) ≤ Var | |[hSR ]i ||[hRDk ]i |e |
δ4
i∈Ω1
Let us first investigate [hSR ]i ||[hRDk ]i |ejΘi,k and   
[hSR ]i [hRDk ]i ej φ̃i,k in (3), and their mean square can + Var | [hSR ]i [hRDk ]i e jφ̃i,k 2
|
respectively be expressed as i∈Ω2
  
jΘi,k 2 2ρ4 P 2
(d)
E | |[hSR ]i ||[hRDk ]i |e | ≤ (M 2 + (N − M )2 )d−2β −2β
SR dRDk , (17)
i∈Ω1
δ4
2 
M−1 
M where (c) and (d) follow from the fact |x+y|2 ≤ 2(|x|2 +|y|2 )
(a) π
= M d−β −β
SR dRDk + d−β −β
SR dRDk E(cos(Θj,k −Θl,k )) and the Cauchy-Schwarz inequality, respectively. By substitut-
8 j=1 l=j+1 ing (17) into (16) after some manipulations, we further have
    HPS HPS 
(b) π γIRS,k − E(γIRS,k )
= M 1 + 4b−2 (M − 1) sin2 d−β −β
SR dRDk , (12) Var
2b HPS
1 + E(γIRS,k )
and
   2N 2
≤   2 . (18)
E | [hSR ]i [hRDk ]i e | = (N − M )d−β
j φ̃i,k 2 −β
SR dRDk . (13) 2
N + 4 M (M − 1) sin 2πb
b−2
i∈Ω2

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 LI: FAIRNESS-AWARE MULTIUSER SCHEDULING FOR FINITE-RESOLUTION IRS-ASSISTED COMMUNICATION 2399

    
(e) 2ρ2 P
CP S
CIRS,k ≤ E log 1 + | |[h SR ]i ||[hRD ]i |e jΘi,k
+ [hSR ]i [hRDk ]i ej φ̃i,k |2
δ2 k
i∈Ω1 i∈Ω2
  
+| |[hSR ]i ||[hRDk ]i |e jΘi,k
− [hSR ]i [hRDk ]i ej φ̃i,k |2
i∈Ω2 i∈Ω2
     
(f ) ρ2 P
≤ E log 1 + 2 | |[hSR ]i ||[hRDk ]i |ejΘi,k + [hSR ]i [hRDk ]i ej φ̃i,k |2
δ
i∈Ω1 i∈Ω2
  
HP S
CIRS,k
    
ρ2 P
+ E log 1 + 2 | |[hSR ]i ||[hRDk ]i |ejΘi,k + [hSR ]i [hRDk ]i ej φ̃i,k |2
δ
i∈Ω1 i∈Ω2
  
j φ̃i,k 2
+ 2| |[hSR ]i ||[hRDk ]i |e jΘi,k
− [hSR ]i [hRDk ]i e | (21)
i∈Ω2 i∈Ω2

4b−2 M(M−1) sin2 ( πb )

It can be verified that, when 2
is sufficiently CP S
the requirement C̄IRS,k − C̄IRS,k
HP S
≤ R, we only need to
HPS HPS
N 2 √ √
large, Var(
γIRS,k −E(γIRS,k
HPS
)
) will approach zero. Recalling that guarantee log(1+ δ2 ( 5N −( 5−1)M )2 d−β
2ρ P −β
SR dRDk ) ≤ R.
1+E(γIRS,k )
HP S
γIRS,k HP S
−E(γIRS,k )
Thus, after some manipulations, we can arrive at (8). This
E( HP
1+E(γIRS,kS ) ) = 0, (15) can be rewritten as completes the proof.
HP S
C̄IRS,k ≈ log(1 + E(γIRS,k
HP S
)). (19) R EFERENCES
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HP S
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