Performance Analysis of Intelligent Reflective Surfaces for Wireless Communication

Abstract: A statistical characterization of the fundamental performance bounds of an intelligent reflective surface (IRS) intended for aiding wireless communications is presented. To this end, the outage probability, average symbol error probability, and achievable rate bounds are derived in closed-form. By virtue of asymptotic analysis in the high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, the achievable diversity order is derived. Thereby, we show that a diversity gain in the order of the number of passive reflective elements embedded within the IRS can be achieved with only controllable phase adjustments. Thus, IRS has a great potential of boosting the wireless performance by intelligently controlling the propagation channels without employing additional active radio frequency chains.