LAUSR

In this work, we consider a hybrid aerial full-duplex (FD) relaying protocol consisting of a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) mounted over an FD unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relay operating in the decode and forward mode to assist the information transfer between the base station and multiple users. For better spectral efficiency, we investigate the use of non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) in such networks and focus on both the performance analysis and design optimization of the considered RIS-NOMA network under imperfect channel state information (CSI) and successive interference cancellation (SIC) at each user, and residual-self interference (RSI) at UAV. We first formulate the sum rate maximization problem and adopt the block coordinate descent method to deal with the non-convex nature of the problem. Thereafter, we propose an algorithm based on the Riemannian conjugate gradient method to get the optimal phase shifts at the RIS, an iterative algorithm to obtain the optimal UAV/RIS position and the exhaustive method to obtain the optimum power allocation coefficients. Next, with obtained optimal position, phase shift and power coefficients, we further analyze the performance of the network and derive the closed-form expressions of outage probability, achievable throughput and ergodic capacity. We present Monte Carlo simulation-based results to validate the accuracy of the proposed algorithms and derived expressions and demonstrate the superiority of NOMA over OMA.