Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Assisted Coordinated Multipoint in Downlink NOMA Networks

Abstract

In this letter, we investigate the amalgamation between the reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) technology and the joint transmission coordinated multipoint (JT-CoMP) in order to enhance the performance of a cell-edge user equipment (UE) in a two-user non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) group without deteriorating the performance of the NOMA cell-center UE. The RIS is adopted to construct a strong combined channel gain at the cell-edge UE, while JT-CoMP is used to mitigate the effects of inter-cell interference (ICI). In this proposed framework, we derive first a closed-form expression for the ergodic rate of the cell-edge UE, and then we evaluate the network spectral efficiency. We validate the derived expression through Monte-Carlo simulations, where we demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework compared to other multiple access techniques proposed in the literature.