Performance Analysis of STAR-RIS-Assisted NOMA Wireless Systems With Realistic Indoor Outdoor THz Channel Models

In this paper, a simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS)-aided downlink non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) Terahertz (THz) wireless system is proposed for indoor and outdoor transmissions. We consider a near-field communication scenario where an access-point (AP) is deployed near a STAR-RIS panel. For links from the STAR-RIS to users, <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\alpha -\mu$</tex-math></inline-formula> distribution is adopted for the indoor small-scale fading channels, whereas the outdoor channels are based on Gaussian mixture or mixture of gamma, which follows the recent practical measurement reports. To facilitate performance analysis, we derive exact expressions of a probability density function (PDF) and a cumulative distribution function (CDF) of a weighted sum of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\alpha -\mu$</tex-math></inline-formula> variates. Approximate PDF and CDF expressions of a weighted sum of Gaussian mixture variates are derived as well. Based on these results, closed-form expressions of the outage probability and the ergodic capacity, together with their asymptotic formulas at high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), are obtained. Moreover, we analyze the capacity of the THz system at the low SNR regime. Impacts of hardware impairments and STAR-RIS protocols (i.e., energy splitting and mode-switching) on the system performance are evaluated. All developed analytical results are validated and demonstrated via numerical simulations.