Abstract:Existing research provides statistical results on the sum of single-variate Fox-H functions to analyze the performance of diversity receivers and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) based wireless systems. There is a research gap in exact performance analysis when more than a single-variate Fox-H function represents the statistical characterization of wireless systems. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to obtain the distribution of the sum of independent and non-identically distributed (i.ni.d) random variables characterized by the multivariate Fox-H function. Further, we develop a general framework for an exact analysis of the ergodic capacity when the multivariate Fox-H function characterizes the statistics of signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). We apply the derived results to conduct an exact performance analysis of outage probability and ergodic capacity, taking an example of RIS-assisted communication over Rician fading channels with phase errors. We conduct computer simulations to validate the exact analysis and demonstrate performance of the RIS-assisted system under various practically relevant scenarios for a better performance assessment.