Performance Analysis of Intelligent Reflecting Surface Aided Wireless Reconnaissance in Mountain Areas

Due to the unfavorable signal propagation environments, the performance of wireless reconnaissance in mountain areas usually suffers from deep fading and large path loss. Therefore, in this paper an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) aided wireless reconnaissance framework is proposed, which is expected to improve the reconnaissance performance by exploiting the line of sight (LoS) transmission link provided by the IRS. Specifically, we first analyzed the path loss model to show the performance gain brought by the IRS. Then, we evaluated the wireless reconnaissance performance of the proposed design in terms of the minimal detectable power and the maximal detectable distance. Simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed design. In particular, the minimal detectable power is significantly decreased and the maximal detection distance is largely extended, such that the signal source with lower transmission power even located farther away can be detected.