IRS-Assisted UAV Communications with Imperfect Phase Compensation

This work presents a performance analysis on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) assisted wirelesscommunications systems, where one of the UAVs supports intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRS). As theestimation and compensation of the end-to-end phase for each propagation path is prone to errors, imperfectphase compensation at the IRS is taken into consideration. The performance is derived in terms of symbolerror rate (SER) and outage probability, where the phase error is modeled using the von Mises distribution.The air-to-air (A2A) channel foreach propagation path is modeled as a single dominant line-of-sight (LoS) component, and the results arecompared to the Rician channel model. The obtained results reveal that the considered A2A model can beused to accurately represent the A2A channel with Rician fading.