Outage Analysis of an IRS-Assisted 5G and Beyond Wireless Communications System

In this work, we present an outage analysis of an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted wireless communications system considering direct and indirect communication links between the transmitter and the receiver. We derive the probability density function and cumulative distribution function for the combined communication link between the transmitter, IRS, and the receiver. Furthermore, we derive the closed-form expressions for the outage probability, considering the direct link between the transmitter and the receiver as Nakagami-m faded, and the indirect communication link via IRS is considered to be under Rician fading. The analytical results are verified by simulations and give insight into modeling and analysis of N element IRS-assisted wireless communications system. We observe that the performance of the considered IRS- assisted wireless communications system significantly improves with an increase in the number of reflecting elements.