Capacity Degradation with Modeling Hardware Impairment in Large Intelligent Surface

In this paper, we consider capacity degradations stemming from potential hardware impairments (HWI) of newly proposed Large Intelligent Surface (LIS) systems. Without HWI, the utility of surface-area (the first-order derivative of the capacity with respect to surface-area) is shown to be proportional to the inverse of it. With HWI, the capacity as well as the utility of surface-area are both degraded, due to a higher effective noise level caused by the HWI. After first modeling the HWI in a general form, we derive the effective noise density and the decrement of utility in closed-forms. With those the impacts of increasing the surface-area can be clearly seen. One interesting but also natural outcome is that both the capacity and utility can be decreased when increasing the surface-area in the cases with severe HWI. The turning points where the capacity and the utility start to decrease with HWI can be evaluated from the derived formulas for them. Further, we also consider distributed implementations of a LIS system by splitting it into multiple small LIS-Units, where the impacts of HWI can be significantly suppressed due to a smaller surface-area of each unit.