Enhancing Near-Shore Connectivity With IRS Assisted Uplink User Pairing

The Blue Economy is undergoing a transformative shift driven by advancements in green shipping, automation, and digitalization. As maritime operations become increasingly complex, the demand for high-capacity, low-latency, and reliable communication has intensified. To address these challenges, we investigate user pairing with Intelligent Reflecting Surface (IRS)-assisted Non-Orthogonal Multiple Access (NOMA) systems in maritime composite fading channels. IRS enhances signal quality by intelligently optimizing the propagation environment. A key limitation in conventional NOMA user pairing is that unpaired users are often assigned to Orthogonal Multiple Access (OMA), reducing overall spectral efficiency. To overcome this, we study and investigate an efficient Virtual Pairing (VP) algorithm, which enables a strong near-user to be virtually paired with multiple far-users, ensuring efficient resource utilization and eliminating the inefficiencies associated with conventional NOMA and OMA pairing schemes. Additionally, we analyze the impact of wave fluctuations on maritime channels to evaluate system robustness in dynamic environments. Matlab simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms conventional NOMA and OMA pairing schemes by 6 bps/Hz with 40 IRS elements. These findings highlight the potential of IRS-assisted uplink NOMA virtual pairing as a scalable, high-performance solution for next-generation maritime communication networks.