  The concept of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) is considered as a
promising technology for increasing the efficiency of mobile wireless networks.
This is achieved by employing a vast amount of low-cost individually adjustable
passive reflect elements, that are able to apply changes to the reflected
signal. To this end, the IRS makes the environment realtime controllable and
can be adjusted to significantly increase the received signal quality at the
users by passive beamsteering. However, the changes to the reflected signals
have an effect on all users near the IRS, which makes it impossible to optimize
the changes to positively influence every transmission, affected by the
reflections. This results in some users not only experiencing better signal
quality, but also an increase in received interference. To mitigate this
negative side effect of the IRS, this paper utilizes the rate splitting (RS)
technique, which enables the mitigation of interference within the network in
such a way that it also mitigates the increased interference caused by the IRS.
To investigate the effects on the overall power savings, that can be achieved
by combining both techniques, we minimize the required transmit power, needed
to satisfy per-user quality-of-service (QoS) constraints. Numerical results
show the improved power savings, that can be gained by utilizing the IRS and
the RS technique simultaneously. In fact, the concurrent use of both techniques
yields power savings, which are beyond the cumulative power savings of using
each technique separately.
