STARS Assisted Semi-Grant-Free NOMA Communications

This paper investigates the performance of simultaneously transmitting and reflecting surface (STARS) assisted semi-grant-free non-orthogonal multiple access network with randomly distributed users. By deploying STARS, the transmit signals of grant-based user (GBU) and grant-free users (GFUs) can be exquisitely adjusted to reduce interference. We propose a maximum channel scheduling (MCS) protocol that allows a GFU to access GBU’s channel with the assistance of STARS. In particular, the impacts of perfect/imperfect successive interference cancellation (pSIC/ipSIC) on MCS protocol are taken into account. To characterize the performance of STARS aided MCS (STARS-MCS) network, we derive the expressions of outage probability for GBU and GFU with pSIC/ipSIC. By applying convolution theorem and Laplace transform, the asymptotic expressions of outage probability and diversity orders for GBU and GFU are attained. We further design a STARS-based power control (SPC) strategy to eliminate the outage probability error floor and improve the outage performance. Numerical results show that: 1) The performance of STARS-MCS outperforms the existing benchmarks in terms of outage probability and system throughput; 2) The SPC strategy can effectively improve the performance of the STARS-MCS network and eliminate the outage probability error floor at high signal-to-noise ratios; and 3) By adjusting reflection and transmission coefficients of STARS, the outage performance of GBU and GFU can be greatly enhanced.