Abstract
This letter considers minimizing the bit error rate (BER) of unmanned
aerial vehicle (UAV) communications assisted by intelligent reflecting
surfaces (IRSs). By noting that increasing the number of IRS elements in
the presence of phase errors does not necessarily improve the BER, it is
crucial to use only the elements that contribute to reducing the BER.
Consequently, we propose an efficient algorithm to activate only the
elements that improve the BER. The proposed algorithm has lower
complexity and comparable BER to the optimum selection process, which is
an NP-hard problem. The accuracy of the estimated phase is evaluated by
deriving the probability distribution function (PDF) of the least-square
(LS) channel estimator, and showing that the PDF can be closely
approximated by the von Mises distribution at high signal-to-noise
ratios (SNRs). The obtained analytical and simulation results show that
using all the available reflectors can significantly deteriorate the
BER, and thus, elements’ selection is necessary. In particular
scenarios, using about 26% of the reflectors provides more than 10 fold
BER reduction.