Hybrid automatic repeat request‐based intelligent reflecting surface‐assisted communication system

The intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) is an emerging technique to extend wireless coverage. In this letter, the performance of the hybrid automatic repeat request (hybrid ARQ) for an IRS‐assisted system is analysed. More specifically, the outage performance of the IRS‐aided system using hybrid ARQ protocol with chase combining is studied. The asymptotic analysis also shows that the outage performance is better and improves linearly by increasing the number of reflectors of the IRS‐aided system. The results also verify the potential of combining the ARQ scheme in the link layer of the IRS‐aided system and demonstrate that a very small change of path loss condition can impact the performance largely.