Detecting Abrupt Change of Channel Covariance Matrix in IRS-Assisted Communication

Abstract: The knowledge of channel covariance matrices is crucial to the design of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted communication. However, channel covariance matrices may change suddenly in practice. This letter focuses on the detection of the above change in IRS-assisted communication. Specifically, we consider the uplink communication system consisting of a single-antenna user (UE), an IRS, and a multi-antenna base station (BS). We first categorize two types of channel covariance matrix changes based on their impact on system design: Type I change, which denotes the change in the BS receive covariance matrix, and Type II change, which denotes the change in the IRS transmit/receive covariance matrix. Secondly, a powerful method is proposed to detect whether a Type I change occurs, a Type II change occurs, or no change occurs. The effectiveness of our proposed scheme is verified by numerical results.