RIS-Aided Wireless Sensor Network in Presence of Bursty Impulsive Noise for Smart-Grid Communications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) in smart grid (SG) applications are greatly affected by the detrimental impact of bursty impulsive noise (IN) generated by various partial discharges from aging power equipments in Smart Grid's power substations. Additionally, the deleterious impact of fading on the radio frequency (RF) links between the sensor nodes further deteriorates the performance. To alleviate the problem of fading on the RF links, in this paper, we propose to exploit reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs). In addition, to deal with the bursty IN, we consider the maximal a posteriori (MAP) decoding of the received symbols using the Bahl-Cocke-Jelinek-Raviv (BCJR) algorithm. The performance of the considered system is evaluated by deriving a novel closed-form expression for the bit error rate (BER). Furthermore, an asymptotic BER analysis is presented in order to highlight the diversity order achieved by the considered RIS-aided system. Finally, extensive numerical results are provided to demonstrate the significant gain that can be achieved through the proposed RIS-aided architecture for WSNs.