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The concept of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has recently emerged as a promising solution for improving the coverage and energy/spectral efficiency of future wireless communication systems. However, as the number of reflecting elements in an IRS increase, the beam training protocol in IRS-assisted millimeter-wave (mmWave) cellular systems requires a large beam training time because it needs to find the best beam pairs for the link between the base station (BS) and the IRS, as well as the link between the IRS and the mobile station (MS). In this paper, a fast beam training technique for IRS-assisted mmWave cellular systems with a uniform rectangular array is proposed for detecting the best beam pairs of BS-IRS and IRS-MS links simultaneously. Two different types of beam training signals (BTSs) are proposed to distinguish simultaneously transmitted beams from the BSs in multi-cell multi-beam environments: the Zadoff–Chu sequence based BTS (ZC-BTS) and m-sequence based BTS (m-BTS). The correlation properties of ZC-BTSs and m-BTSs are analyzed in multi-cell multi-beam environments. In addition, the effect of symbol time offset on the ZC-BTS and m-BTS is analyzed. Finally, simulation results reveal that the proposed technique can significantly reduce the beam training time for IRS-assisted mmWave cellular systems.

The processing time for beam training in millimeter-wave (mmWave) cellular systems can be significantly reduced by a code division multiplexing (CDM)-based technique, where multiple beams are transmitted simultaneously with their corresponding Tx beam IDs (BIDs) in the preamble. However, mmWave cellular systems with CDM-based preambles require a large number of cell IDs (CIDs) and BIDs, and a high computational complexity for CID and BID (CBID) searches. In this paper, a new preamble design technique that can increase the number of CBIDs significantly is proposed, using a preamble sequence constructed by a combination of two Zadoff-Chu (ZC) sequences. An efficient technique for the CBID detection is also described for the proposed preamble. It is shown by simulations using a simple model of an mmWave cellular system that the proposed technique can obtain a significant reduction in the complexity of the CBID detection without a noticeable performance degradation, compared to the previous technique.