Blind RIS Aided Ordered NOMA: Design, Probability of Outage Analysis and Transmit Power Optimization

Abstract

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has been widely acclaimed as a promising solution to enhance spectral efficiency, increase user fairness, and scale up the number of users in wireless networks by enabling multiple users to share the symmetrical wireless resources. This work is concerned with the development and implementation of blind reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided ordered NOMA (ONOMA) for smart reflector (SR) and access point (AP) configurations. For the RIS-SR-ONOMA and RIS-AP-ONOMA configurations, the closed-form probability of outage expressions is derived, and their performance is reported for distinct values of passive reflector elements. Through optimal power allocation, the downlink (DL) sum capacity is maximized. RIS-aided ONOMA reduces outage rates and increases sum capacity over the traditional ONOMA system. It is discovered that the RIS-aided ONOMA system increases the sum capacity by ≈33% at 20 dB signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for 32 passive reflector elements. The addition of passive reflector elements and symmetrical allocation among users improves the performance of RIS-SR-ONOMA and RIS-AP-ONOMA in terms of outage probability, sum capacity, and probability of error. The proposed work can be employed in applications such as vehicular ad hoc networks, where obtaining precise channel information is difficult due to the rapid mobility of the vehicles.