Performance Analysis of Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Wireless Networks with Wireless Power Transfer

The low efficiency of wireless power transfer (WPT) poses a key challenge for energy-constrained wireless networks. To address this issue, in this letter, the integration of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) into a WPT network is investigated. To this end, an accurate approximation for the probability density function of the end-to-end cascaded fading channel is presented. By leveraging the derived result, accurate closed-form expressions of the outage probability (OP) and average symbol error probability (ASER) are derived for the proposed IRS-aided WPT system. To gain further insight into the system performance, asymptotic closed-form expressions for the ASER and OP are further derived and interesting observations are reported. Particularly, our asymptotic analysis reveals that the achievable diversity in the underlying scenario is independent of the reflective elements of the IRS. The analytical derivations, corroborated by simulation results, demonstrate that IRSs can be promising candidates for the realization of a highly efficient power transfer enabled wireless network.