A newer technology i.e., intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has the potential to overcome the poor propagation effects of the wireless channel and is fast becoming a household name in academia and within the industry due to the recent advances in the technology of metamaterials [29]. IRS is a novel hardware technology that can increase signal coverage and reduce energy consumption at a lower deployment cost [30]. IRS is also known as reconfigurable reflecting surface, large intelligent surface, and software-controlled metasurface. The advances in artificial electromagnetic materials has made the ability to control the communication environment through digital, programmable and reconfigurable methods using the IRS a reality [31]. An IRS offers a different solution to relaying and backscatter communications. An IRS is a metasurface consisting of many small reconfigurable passive low-cost reflecting elements that can easily introduce a controlled individual phase shift to the impinging electromagnetic wave and as a result alter the propagation characteristic between the transmitter and receiver to maximize signal strength and mitigate interference. The element in an IRS reflects incident electromagnetic waves independently with an adjustable phase-shift. In addition, as the IRS is passive, the incident signal is reflected without a dedicated energy source for RF processing, encoding/decoding and retransmission. Therefore, an IRS also offers an energy-saving solution when compared to amplify-and-forward (AF) relays as it only reflects the incident signals without any transmitter modulation [32]. Moreover, by smartly adjusting the phase-shifts of the elements using a smart controller, an IRS can employ beamforming to support dynamic wireless communication and suppress interference between users. These advantages have made the IRS a key technology for future wireless communications [30] and is the topic of this survey. There are several surveys available in the literature on IRS technology. Ref. [33] discusses the applications of metasurfaces and distinguishes them from conventional frequency-selective surfaces. Authors in [34] provide an overview of IRS technology, including its main applications in wireless communication, competitive advantages over existing technologies, hardware architecture as well as the corresponding new signal model. In [35], authors highlight that the IRS network can only control the transmitter and the receiver and discusses path loss and asymptotic beamforming gain. Authors in [24] provide a survey on the IRS covering the basic concepts, performance metrics, reconfigurability and most recent applications. Ref. [36] discusses passive holographic MIMO surfaces that leverage the subwavelength metallic or dielectric scattering particles. Ref. [37] focuses on physical layer challenges for the implementation of IRS technology. In contrast to other surveys, the motivation of this survey is to provide a more comprehensive discussion on IRS technology with a focus on recent research advancements. Therefore, this survey provides a more detailed discussion on IRS technology and covers historical concepts, nomenclature, system architecture and design, an IRS-aided wireless network deployment and performance, smart radio channels with an an IRS and the limitations of the existing works and key future research directions. Furthermore, this survey covers several recent research advancements such as IRS-assisted UAV or UAV-satellite systems [38; 39], an IRS aided for mobile edge computing [40; 41], IRS-aided multiuser communication [42], IRS-aided localization [43; 44], IRS-aided vehicular communications [45] and IRS-aided power transfer [46; 47]. Finally, this survey discusses the current research gaps/opportunities and the possible solutions. This survey discusses the design and application of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) for 5G and beyond wireless communication network.