Enhancing NOMA Backscatter IoT Communications With RIS

As potential solutions to empower transmissions among the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, ambient radio frequency (RF) backscatter technology and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have recently attracted a lot of attention. To improve energy and spectrum efficiency, we design a system with a transmit antenna selection (TAS)-aided base station (BS) relying on nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA), RIS, and backscatter communications (BackCom) with robust transmission links, allowing more users to be served effectively. We adopt the two-user grouping model in the coverage of main BS associated with a particular RIS and interference from coordinate BS is also considered to showcase differences among the performance of the two different kinds of users (i.e., the IoT user with and the IoT user without a dedicated RIS). To exhibit the system performance, we derive closed-form expressions for two main system performance metrics, namely, outage probability and ergodic capacity. A degraded performance is also considered for the case of imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC). The benefits of the BackCom RIS-aided NOMA system are then demonstrated by comparing its performance to that of traditional orthogonal multiple access (OMA) RIS-aided backscatter systems. We then introduce analytical models to characterize the impact of the main factors on the outage performance and characterize the optimal performance in specific cases. Together with extensive simulations, our analysis shows that the system performance can be adjusted by controlling factors, including power allocation coefficients, the number of metasurfaces of RIS, and target rates.