Outage Probability Analysis of Wireless Paths with Faulty Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces

We consider a next generation wireless network incorporating a base station a set of typically low-cost and faulty Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces (RISs). The base station needs to select the path including the RIS to provide the maximum signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) to the user. We study the effect of the number of elements, distance and RIS hardware failure on the path outage probability, and based on the known signal propagation model at high frequencies, derive the closed-form expression for the said probability of outage. Numerical results show the path outage likelihood as function of the probability of hardware failure of RIS elements, the number of elements, and the distance between mobile users and the RIS.