Spatially Correlated Dual Hop RIS Aided Next Generation Wireless Systems: An Outage Perspective

Design and analysis of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RIS) assisted new wireless communication systems have attracted much attention among the 6G technology researchers. Recently, studies were made to compare the use of RIS and Decode and Forward (DF) relaying when a weak direct path exists between the transmitter and receiver. Amalgamating the merits of both RIS and DF relay technologies, an RIS assisted DF relay-based cooperative wireless system with energy harvesting is proposed in this paper. A Lambertian model of reflectance is employed in the analysis of the reflecting nature of RIS. Further, the impact of spatial correlation which arises due to the tightly-packed planar RIS array geometry is also considered for performance analysis. By varying inter-element distances and transmit power, the performance of the proposed system is analyzed in terms of outage probability and energy harvesting capability. Numerical expressions are derived for the outage probability of the proposed system and verified using Monte-Carlo simulations. Based on the high performance, the concept of joint use of RIS and DF Relay is extended to the Index Modulation (IM) based wireless system.