Two-way communications empowered by reconfigurable intelligent surfaces and direct link: Outage analysis under hardware impairments and Nakagami-m fading

In this article, we consider a two-way communication system empowered by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS), consisting of N passive reflective elements, in the presence of transceiver hardware impairments (HIs). To exploit the existence of a direct link between the end communication nodes, we utilize two time slots for their information exchange. We particularly analyze the instantaneous end-to-end signal-to-noise-plus-distortion-ratios (SNDRs) under HIs. The exact distribution of the magnitude of the end-to-end channel coefficients of the studied RIS-empowered communication system is derived under HIs and Nakagami-m fading channels. Using different settings for the level of HIs and the transmit powers at the end nodes, we also deduce novel exact and upper bound analytical expressions for the overall outage probability (OOP). For the high signal-to-noise ratio regime, an asymptotic OOP analysis is derived, which unveils the system’s diversity order. The presented numerical and simulation results corroborate our derived analytical findings, and demonstrate the impact of different system and channel parameters on the system’s OOP performance.