Copula-Based Modeling of RIS-Assisted Communications: Outage Probability Analysis

Statistical characterization of the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted communications in the presence of phase noise is an important open issue. In this letter, we exploit the concept of copula modeling to capture the non-standard dependence features that appear due to the presence of discrete phase noise. In particular, we consider the outage probability of RIS systems in Rayleigh fading channels and provide joint distributions to characterize the dependencies due to the use of finite resolution phase shifters at the RIS. Numerical assessments confirm the validity of closed-form expressions of the outage probability and motivate the use of bivariate copula for further RIS studies.