Abstract:Reconfigurable refractive surface (RRS) is an efficient alternative to holographic multiple input multiple outputs (HMIMO) systems that can serve as a transmission unit operating in the signal refraction mode. RRS transmissions experience near-field propagation due to the proximity of the transmission feed and far-field propagation for the user located farther from the transmitting unit. There is limited research on the effect of channel fading on far-field users in RRS-based transmissions. In this paper, we conduct an exact statistical analysis of RRS-based transmission considering alpha-eta-kappa-mu fading model for the far-field user and the near-field effect of transmission feed. First, we show the exact statistical analysis for the RRS transmission over alpha-eta-kappa-mu fading model consisting of multiple infinite-series representations with multivariate Fox-H function. Next, we develop a novel approach to derive the density and distribution functions for the resultant fading channel of the RRS system in terms of multivariate Fox-H functions without involving infinite series approximations for tractable performance analysis. We present the exact outage probability and average bit-error-rate (BER) performance of single-element and multiple-element RRS systems to validate the proposed analysis further. We also obtain the diversity order of the system by analyzing the outage probability at a high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Computer simulations demonstrate the relevance of the developed statistical results for RRS-based wireless systems over the generalized fading model for a comprehensive performance evaluation.