A Simple Design of IRS-NOMA Transmission

TL;DR

This paper introduces a straightforward IRS-assisted NOMA transmission scheme that enhances user multiplexing by aligning channel directions, with analytical and simulation results demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness against hardware impairments.

Contribution

It presents a novel, simple IRS-NOMA design that improves user service capacity over traditional SDMA by channel direction alignment, supported by analytical and simulation validation.

Findings

IRS-NOMA outperforms SDMA in serving more users.

Channel alignment via IRS enhances NOMA performance.

Hardware impairments impact is analyzed.

Abstract

This letter proposes a simple design of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmission, which can ensure that more users are served on each orthogonal spatial direction than spatial division multiple access (SDMA). In particular, by employing IRS, the directions of users' channel vectors can be effectively aligned, which facilitates the implementation of NOMA. Both analytical and simulation results are provided to demonstrate the performance of the proposed IRS-NOMA scheme and also study the impact of hardware impairments on IRS-NOMA.