On the Performance of IRS-Aided UAV Networks With NOMA

Abstract

This paper investigates the performance of an intelligent reflective surface (IRS) assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system, where the IRS is mounted on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to assist the transmissions from a base station (BS). The BS utilizes the UAV as a relay to serve multiple user equipments (UEs) on the ground. In addition to the IRS relaying links, we also incorporate direct non line-of-sight links between the BS and UEs. We derive the outage probability for this system configuration. Moreover, we obtain a bound of the ergodic spectral efficiency to extract various useful insights. Furthermore, we also compare the performance of the proposed system design against the baseline scheme. Finally, we present numerical results to highlight the benefits of the proposed IRS-aided UAV relaying system and the accuracy of the derived analytical results.