Reliability Analysis of Large Intelligent Surfaces (LISs): Rate Distribution and Outage Probability

Abstract: Large intelligent surfaces (LISs) have been recently proposed as an effective wireless communication solution that can leverage antenna arrays deployed on the entirety of man-made structures such as walls. An LIS can provide space-intensive and reliable communication, enabling the desired wireless channel to exhibit a perfect line-of-sight. However, the outage probability of LIS, which is an important performance metric to evaluate the system reliability, remains uncharacterized. In this paper, the distribution of uplink sum-rate is asymptotically analyzed for an LIS system. Given the derived asymptotic distribution, the outage probability is derived for the considered LIS system. Simulation results show that the results of the proposed asymptotic analyses are in close agreement to the exact mutual information in the presence of a large number of antennas and devices.