RIS-Aided Wireless Sensor Network in the Presence of Impulsive Noise and Interferers for Smart-Grid Communications

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) deployed in smart grid (SG) environments are greatly affected by the detrimental impact of impulsive noise (IN) and channel fading on radio frequency (RF) links between the sensor nodes. To overcome this, we propose a multi RIS-aided architecture where the sensor nodes communicate with the help of RISs. A realistic scenario is considered in which both the RISs and the destination sensor are affected by IN and there is presence of imperfect channel state information (CSI) at the destination node. Further, the destination sensor node also suffers interference from nearby sensor nodes. Delving on the moment matching approach, Gamma distribution based approximation is proposed for both the received signal power as well as the interference plus IN power based on which the proposed system's performance is evaluated by deriving a novel closed-form expression for the outage probability (OP). Interestingly, it is shown through numerical results that the system's performance worsens when the IN power is larger at the distributed RISs compared to the destination sensor node.