Air Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface Enhanced Multiuser NOMA System

Abstract

This article proposes a new framework of aerial reconfigurable intelligent surface (ARIS) enhancing the nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) system. The base station (BS) transmits superimposed signals to multiple users with different channel gains through ARIS which can flexibly change channel conditions and perform intelligent NOMA operations. It ensures that our system can perform well in providing services to multiple users simultaneously. In this system, the placement of the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is jointly optimized along with the AIRS passive beam and the multiuser power allocation in order to maximize the communication sum rate. Since the joint optimization problem is nonconvex and coupled, it is hence disintegrated into three subproblems and it is solved alternately through the successive convex approximation (SCA). Moreover, semi definite programming (SDP) is used to deal with the rank one constraint of RIS reflection matrix and comparisons are made using particle swarm optimization (PSO). The numerical results show that the proposed ARIS-NOMA framework can achieve better sum rate performance than traditional NOMA with fixed RIS and OMA-ARIS.