Outage Performance Analysis of Reconfigurable Intelligent Surfaces-Aided NOMA Under Presence of Hardware Impairment

The future of wireless communications looks exciting with the potential new use cases and challenging requirements of future 6th generation (6G) wireless networks. Since the traditional wireless communications, the propagation medium has been perceived as a randomly behaving entity between the transmitter and the receiver, which degrades the quality of the received signal due to the uncontrollable interactions of the transmitted radio waves with the surrounding objects. The recent advent of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) in wireless communications enables, on the other hand, network operators to control the radio waves (the scattering, reflection, and refraction characteristics) to eliminate the negative effects of natural wireless propagation. Recent results have revealed that non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) benefits from RIS mechanism which can effectively provide effective transmissions. Motivated by the potential of these emerging technologies, we study the impact of hardware impairment in RIS-aided NOMA system in term of performance metrics. We then derive analytical expressions of outage probability and throughput as main performance metrics. Simulations are conducted to validate the analytical expressions. We find that the number of meta-surfaces in RIS, transmit power at the base station, power allocation factors play important role to demonstrate improvement in system performance of RIS relying on NOMA compared with orthogonal multiple access (OMA). Numerical results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed RIS-aided NOMA transmission strategies.