TAOS Best Paper Award for 2024

The IEEE Communications Society’s TAOS TC has selected our paper below for the 2024 Best Paper Award. With a history that dates back to more than 60 years, TAOS is one of the IEEE Communication Society’s most active and vibrant TCs.

Hedieh Ajam, Vahid Jamali, Vasilis K. Papanikolaou, Bernhard Schmauss, and Robert Schober, “Delay Dispersion in IRS-assisted FSO Links”, IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), 2024.

Abstract: The line-of-sight (LOS) requirement of free-space optical (FSO) systems can be relaxed by employing optical intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). In this paper, we model the impact of the IRS-induced delay dispersion and derive the channel impulse response (CIR) of IRS-assisted FSO links. The proposed model takes into account the characteristics of the incident and reflected beams’ wavefronts, the position of transmitter and receiver, the size of the IRS, and the incident beamwidth on the IRS. Our simulation results reveal that a maximum effective delay spread of 0.7 ns is expected for a square IRS with area 1 m², which induces inter-symbol interference for bit rates larger than 10 Gbps. We show that the IRS-induced delay dispersion can be mitigated via equalization at the receiver.