Transmission scheme for collaborative‐RIS‐aided NOMA system with multiple channels

Abstract This paper investigates the combination of collaborative reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) with non‐orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) to enhance the quality of service (QoS) in communication systems. By introducing collaborative RIS, a virtual line‐of‐sight (LoS) link can be established between the base station (BS) and the users. In this article, the aim is to minimize the total transmit power under the constraint of each user's QoS by optimizing the phase shifts and the power allocation coefficients. To proceed, two approaches are proposed with different complexities to solve the formulated power minimization problem. Specifically, in the first method, a sub‐channel allocation scheme based on the user locations is developed, and the phase shifts are optimized to obtain the minimum transmit power for fixed channel assignment, which is further addressed by using the alternating optimization and the sequence rotation methods. In the second approach, a joint optimization algorithm that achieves the channel assignment vectors and the phase shift coefficients in an alternative manner, and a sub‐channel assignment algorithm based on the equivalent channel gain is developed. The simulation results show that the proposed transmission scheme has the capability of improving system performance significantly compared with the conventional schemes.