Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Aided NOMA Networks

TLDR

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) are a promising enhancement for next‑generation wireless networks, improving both spectral and energy efficiency. The study proposes a RIS‑aided NOMA system that designs passive beamforming weights to serve paired power‑domain users and investigates its diversity orders and high‑SNR rate slopes. We derive best‑case and worst‑case channel statistics, closed‑form outage probability and ergodic rate expressions, diversity orders, high‑SNR slopes, and compute the spectral and energy efficiencies for the proposed RIS‑aided NOMA network. Analytical results show that BS‑user links have negligible impact on diversity orders when many RISs are used, and numerical results confirm a high‑SNR slope of one and superior performance over orthogonal schemes.

Abstract

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) constitute a promising performance enhancement for next-generation (NG) wireless networks in terms of enhancing both their spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE). We conceive a system for serving paired power-domain non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) users by designing the passive beamforming weights at the RISs. In an effort to evaluate the network performance, we first derive the best-case and worst-case of new channel statistics for characterizing the effective channel gains. Then, we derive the best-case and worst-case of our closed-form expressions derived both for the outage probability and for the ergodic rate of the prioritized user. For gleaning further insights, we investigate both the diversity orders of the outage probability and the high-signal-to-noise (SNR) slopes of the ergodic rate. We also derive both the SE and EE of the proposed network. Our analytical results demonstrate that the base station (BS)-user links have almost no impact on the diversity orders attained when the number of RISs is high enough. Numerical results are provided for confirming that: i) the high-SNR slope of the RIS-aided network is one; ii) the proposed RIS-aided NOMA network has superior network performance compared to its orthogonal counterpart.