Performance Evaluation and Diversity Analysis of RIS-Assisted Communications Over Generalized Fading Channels in the Presence of Phase Noise

In this paper, we develop a unified theoretical framework for analyzing the outage performance of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs)-assisted communication systems over generalized fading channels and in the presence of phase noise. Fox’s H function theory is then utilized to derive the outage probability for various channel fading and phase noise distributions in closed-form. We further conduct an asymptotic outage analysis to obtain insightful findings. In particular, we present the maximum diversity order achievable over such channels and demonstrate the performance variation in comparison to conventional Rayleigh channels. Then, based on upper bounds and lower bounds, we propose a design criteria for RISs to achieve the maximum diversity order in the presence of phase noise. More specifically, we show that if the absolute difference between pairs of phase errors is less than
$\pi /2$
, RIS-assisted communications achieve the full diversity order over independent fading channels, even in the presence of phase noise. The theoretical frameworks and findings are validated with the aid of Monte Carlo simulations.