Intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs) can be beneficial to both information and energy transfer, due to the gains achieved by their multiple elements. In this work, we deal with the impact of spatial correlation between the IRS elements, in the context of simultaneous wireless information and power transfer. The performance is evaluated in terms of the average harvested energy and the outage probability for random and equal phase shifts. Closed-form analytical expressions for both metrics under spatial correlation are derived. Moreover, the optimal case is considered when the elements are uncorrelated and fully correlated. In the uncorrelated case, random and equal phase shifts provide the same performance. However, the performance of correlated elements attains significant gains when there are equal phase shifts. Finally, we show that correlation is always beneficial to energy transfer, whereas it is a degrading factor for information transfer under random and optimal configurations.

翻译：智能反射表面(IRS)可因其多重要素的增益而有利于信息和能源转移。在这项工作中,我们在同步无线信息和电力传输的背景下处理IRS元素之间的空间相关性的影响。性能根据平均收获的能量和随机和平均阶段转移的断裂概率进行评估。根据空间相关性,得出两种指标的封闭式分析表达法。此外,当元素不相干且完全相关时,则考虑最佳情况。在不相关的情况下,随机和平等阶段转移提供相同的性能。然而,相关要素的性能在等阶段转移的情况下取得了显著的收益。最后,我们表明,相关性总是有利于能源转移,而随机和最佳配置下的信息转让则是一个有辱人格的因素。