Effective capacity analysis of reconfigurable intelligent surfaces aided NOMA network

Abstract The future sixth generation (6G) is going to face the significant challenges of massive connections and green communication. Recently, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) have been proposed as two key technologies to solve the above problems. Motivated by this fact, we consider a downlink RIS-aided NOMA system, where the source aims to communicate with the two NOMA users via RIS. Considering future network supporting real-time service, we investigate the system performance with the view of effective capacity (EC), which is an important evaluation metric of delay sensitive systems. Specifically, we derive the analytical expressions of the EC of the near and far users. To obtain more useful insights, we deduce the analytical approximation expressions of the EC in the low signal-to-noise-ratio approximation by utilizing Taylor expansion. Moreover, we provide the results of orthogonal multiple access (OMA) for the purpose of comparison. It is found that (1) The number of RIS components and the transmission power of the source have important effects on the performance of the considered system; (2) Compared with OMA, NOMA system has higher EC due to the short transmission time.