Effect of Impulsive Noise on IRS-Aided Communication Systems

Recent studies have explored the potential benefits of the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) in different wireless communication scenarios. However, no work has quantitatively analyzed the performance of IRS-aided communication systems impaired by non-Gaussian noise. In this article, motivated by this research gap, we study the effect of impulsive noise on IRS-aided communication systems. Specifically, the channel impairments are modeled by Middleton's class A noise (MCA) and Weibull fading. By leveraging the Laguerre series, accurate channel distributions are derived. Building upon these expressions, new closed-form expressions of average bit-error-rate (BER), average channel capacity (ACC), and outage probability (OP) are obtained. To gain further insight into the system performance at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) regime, the asymptotic expressions of BER, OP, and ACC are derived. In addition, a tight upper bound of ACC is obtained. The effect of the impulsive index $ (A)$ on the systems performance metrics is investigated for different parameter settings. Moreover, it is shown that IRS-assisted communication systems outperforms a multi-hop relaying network impaired by impulsive noise. The results reveal that the system performance impaired by impulsive noise can be significantly improved by increasing the reflecting elements (REs). The derived expressions are in excellent agreement with Monte-Carlo simulations.