Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a promising technique to enhance wireless communication performance cost effectively. The existing literature has mainly considered IRS being deployed near user terminals to improve their performance. However, this approach may incur a high cost if IRSs need to be densely deployed in the network to cater to random user locations. To avoid such high deployment cost, in this paper we consider a new IRS aided wireless network architecture, where IRSs are deployed in the vicinity of each base station (BS) to assist in its communications with distributed users regardless of their locations. Besides significantly enhancing IRSs' signal coverage, this scheme helps reduce the IRS associated channel estimation overhead as compared to conventional user-side IRSs, by exploiting the nearly static BS-IRS channels over short distance. For this scheme, we propose a new two stage transmission protocol to achieve IRS channel estimation and reflection optimization for uplink data transmission efficiently. In addition, we propose effective methods for solving the user IRS association problem based on long term channel knowledge and the selected user IRS BS cascaded channel estimation problem. Finally, all IRSs' passive reflections are jointly optimized with the BS's multi-antenna receive combining to maximize the minimum achievable rate among all users for data transmission. Numerical results show that the proposed co site IRS empowered BS scheme can achieve significant performance gains over the conventional BS without co site IRS and existing schemes for IRS channel estimation and reflection optimization, thus enabling an appealing low cost and high performance BS design for future wireless networks.
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