Error Performance Analysis of UAV-Mounted RIS for NOMA Systems With Practical Constraints

Uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted recent attention for sixth-generation (6G) networks due to their low cost and flexible deployment. In order to maximize the ever-increasing data rates, spectral efficiency, and wider coverage, technologies such as reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) and non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) are adapted with UAVs (UAV-RIS NOMA). However, the error performance of UAV-RIS NOMA has not been considered, yet. In this letter, we investigate the error probability of UAV-RIS NOMA systems. We also consider the practical constraints of hardware impairments (HWI) at the transceivers, inter-cell interference (ICI), and imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC). The analytical derivations are validated by Monte-Carlo simulations. Our results demonstrate that our proposed system achieves higher performance gain (more than 5 dB with increasing the number of RIS elements) with less error probability compared to UAVs without RIS. Moreover, it is found that the HWI, ICI, and imperfect SIC have shown a negative impact on the system performance.