  Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is being considered as a prospective
candidate for next-generation wireless communication due to its ability to
significantly improve coverage and spectral efficiency by controlling the
propagation environment. One of the ways IRS increases spectral efficiency is
by adjusting phase shifts to perform passive beamforming. In this letter, we
integrate the concept of IRS-aided communication to the domain of
multi-direction beamforming, whereby multiple receive antennas are selected to
convey more information bits than existing spatial modulation (SM) techniques
at any specific time. To complement this system, we also propose a successive
signal detection (SSD) technique at the receiver. Numerical results show that
the proposed design is able to improve the average successful bits transmitted
(ASBT) by the system, which outperforms other state-of-the-art methods proposed
in the literature.
