Performance Analysis of IRS-Assisted NOMA Networks With Randomly Deployed Users

Zheng Yang, Peng Xu, Gaojie Chen, Yi Wu, Zhiguo Ding

Abstract: In this article, we investigate the intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted downlink nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA) networks, where the users are randomly deployed in a disk. The randomly deployed users are divided into two groups, named center group and edge group, and then two distance-dependent user selection schemes are proposed. The developed closed-form expressions of outage probability and average rate for the proposed two user selection schemes in IRS-assisted NOMA networks are derived, as well as the asymptotic results at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and the number of the reflecting number of the IRS trends to infinity, respectively. The asymptotic analysis results of outage probability for cell-edge user decay as <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\frac{\ln \mathrm{SNR}}{\mathrm{SNR} ^{K+1}}$</tex-math></inline-formula> , and the achieved diversity gain is <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K+1$</tex-math></inline-formula> , at high SNR region, where <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K$</tex-math></inline-formula> denotes the number of elements of the IRS. Furthermore, as <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$K \rightarrow \infty$</tex-math></inline-formula> , the asymptotic average rate of cell-edge user only depends on the power allocation factor of cell-center user. In addition, compared to IRS-assisted orthogonal multiple access networks, the IRS-assisted NOMA networks can always realize lower outage performance and higher average rate. Finally, Monte–Carlo simulation results are provided to verify the accuracy of the developed analytical results for the proposed two user selection schemes.