Outage Probability Analysis of Wireless Paths with Faulty Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the outage probability in wireless networks with faulty reconfigurable intelligent surfaces, deriving a closed-form expression to evaluate how hardware failures and system parameters affect signal reliability.

Contribution

It provides a novel analytical model for outage probability considering hardware faults in RISs, which was not previously addressed in detail.

Findings

Outage probability increases with RIS hardware failure rate.

More RIS elements reduce outage probability.

Greater distance between user and RIS increases outage likelihood.

Abstract

We consider a next generation wireless network incorporating a base station a set of typically low-cost and faulty Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs). The base station needs to select the path including the RIS to provide the maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to the user. We study the effect of the number of elements, distance and RIS hardware failure on the path outage probability, and based on the known signal propagation model at high frequencies, derive the closed-form expression for the said probability of outage. Numerical results show the path outage likelihood as function of the probability of hardware failure of RIS elements, the number of elements, and the distance between mobile users and the RIS.