The α-F composite distribution with pointing errors: Theory and applications to RIS

The α-F composite fading distribution with pointing errors is investigated in this paper. New expressions for the probability density function and cumulative distribution function of the envelope/instantaneous signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), higher-order moments, and moment generating function of the instantaneous SNR are derived. Based on the aforementioned statistics, expressions for the outage probability, symbol error probability, and ergodic channel capacity are obtained. An asymptotic analysis is also provided. Furthermore, an application of the α-F model with pointing errors in a wireless emerging system, namely reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS), is shown. Several curves, corroborated by Monte-Carlo simulations, are presented for different values that characterize the channel and pointing error parameters.