An SCA and Relaxation Based Energy Efficiency Optimization for Multi-User RIS-Assisted NOMA Networks

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmission can effectively improve the energy/spectrum efficiency in wireless networks. This paper designs a low-complexity scheme to achieve the balanced tradeoff between the sum-rate and power consumption in a RIS-assisted NOMA system, which can be measured by energy efficiency. To solve the formulated problem effectively, the original non-convex problem is first decomposed into two subproblems, i.e., beamforming optimization and phase shift optimization. Alternating optimization is proposed to solve these two subproblems iteratively. In particular, successive convex approximation (SCA) is utilized to convert the non-convex constraints to convex ones. The provided simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve superior performance on energy efficiency compared to the random phase shifts and orthogonal multiple access (OMA) schemes.