RIS-Assisted Interference Mitigation for Uplink NOMA

TL;DR

This paper explores how reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) can significantly reduce user transmit power in uplink NOMA systems, even under jamming, by optimizing propagation paths through numerical methods.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to minimize user power in uplink NOMA using RIS, considering both phase-only and attenuating RIS configurations, under interference constraints.

Findings

RIS reduces user transmit power in interference-limited scenarios

Attenuating RIS elements outperform phase-only RIS in power reduction

Numerical optimization effectively manages non-linear, non-convex problem constraints

Abstract

Non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has become a promising technology for next-generation wireless communications systems due to its capability to provide access for multiple users on the same resource. In this paper, we consider an uplink power-domain NOMA system aided by a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) in the presence of a jammer that aims to maximize its interference on the base station (BS) uplink receiver. We consider two kinds of RISs, a regular RIS whose elements can only change the phase of the incoming wave, and an RIS whose elements can also attenuate the incoming wave. Our aim is to minimize the total power transmitted by the user terminals under quality-of-service constraints by controlling both the propagation from the users and the jammer to the BS with help of the RIS. The resulting objective function and constraints are both non-linear and non-convex, so we address this problem using numerical optimization. Our numerical results show that the RIS can help to dramatically reduce the per user required transmit power in an interference-limited scenario.