Capacity Analysis of IRS-Based UAV Communications With Imperfect Phase Compensation

This letter presents the capacity analysis of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) communications supported by flying intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). In the considered system, some of the UAVs are equipped with an IRS panel that applies certain phase-shifts to the incident waves before being reflected to the receiving UAV. In contrast to existing work, this letter considers the effect of imperfect phase knowledge on the system capacity, where the phase error is modeled as a von Mises random variable with parameter κ. Analytical results, corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations, show that the achievable capacity is dependent on the phase error, however, the capacity loss becomes negligible at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and when κ ≥ 6.