Error Performance Analysis of UAV-Mounted RIS for NOMA Systems with Practical Constraints

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the error performance of UAV-mounted RIS in NOMA systems, considering practical hardware impairments, interference, and SIC imperfections, demonstrating significant performance gains with increased RIS elements.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed error probability analysis of UAV-RIS NOMA systems under realistic constraints, including hardware impairments and interference.

Findings

Performance gain of over 5 dB with more RIS elements

HWI, ICI, and SIC imperfections negatively affect system performance

UAV-RIS NOMA outperforms UAVs without RIS in error probability

Abstract

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted recent attention for sixth-generation (6G) networks due to their low cost and flexible deployment. In order to maximize the ever-increasing data rates, spectral efficiency, and wider coverage, technologies such as reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are adapted with UAVs (UAV-RIS NOMA). However, the error performance of UAV-RIS NOMA has not been considered, yet. In this letter, we investigate the error probability of UAV-RIS NOMA systems. We also consider the practical constraints of hardware impairments (HWI) at the transceivers, inter-cell interference (ICI), and imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC). The analytical derivations are validated by Monte-Carlo simulations. Our results demonstrate that our proposed system achieves higher performance gain (more than 5 dB with increasing the number of RIS elements) with less error probability compared to UAVs without RIS. Moreover, it is found that the HWI, ICI, and imperfect SIC have shown a negative impact on the system performance.