A Statistical Characterization Of Communication Performance In RIS-Aided Networks

Abstract

Emerging scenarios envision a widespread deployment of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) across structures and objects to manage wave propagation and create smart radio environments (SREs). While numerous studies have explored indoor and outdoor integration of large-scale RIS, many of these analyses oversimplify channel characteristics and assume ideal or random phase profiles for RISs, which may not align with realistic situations. Thus, this paper introduces a comprehensive communication outage analysis that, unlike existing literature, accounts for practical phase profiles on the cascaded double Rician fading channel BS-RIS-UE. We validate our model through extensive numerical simulations, discussing the trade-offs between the number of RIS antennas and quantization bits per RIS.