On Hybrid-ARQ-Based Intelligent Reflecting Surface-Assisted Communication System

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the outage performance of an IRS-assisted communication system employing hybrid-ARQ with chase combining, demonstrating significant improvements with more reflectors and highlighting the impact of path loss variations.

Contribution

It provides the first analysis of hybrid-ARQ performance in IRS-assisted systems, revealing how reflector count and path loss influence outage probability.

Findings

Outage performance improves better than linearly with more IRS reflectors.

Hybrid-ARQ with chase combining enhances system reliability.

Small changes in path loss significantly affect performance.

Abstract

The intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is an emerging technique to extend the wireless coverage. In this letter, the performance of hybrid automatic repeat request (hybrid-ARQ) for an IRS-assisted system is analyzed. More specifically, the outage performance of the IRS-aided system using hybrid-ARQ protocol with chase combining is studied. Asymptotic analysis also shows that the outage performance improves better than linearly by increasing number of reflectors of the IRS-aided system. The results also verify the potential of combining the ARQ scheme in the link layer of the IRS-aided system and demonstrate that very small change of path loss condition can impact the performance largely.