STAR-RIS-Enabled Short-Packet NOMA Systems

This paper analyzes the performance of simultaneous transmitting and reflecting (STAR) reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-enabled short-packet non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) systems. A mode-switching protocol combined with partition strategies (MSPS) for the STAR-RIS design is proposed to simultaneously serve multiple actuators along with the discrete phase-shift alignment in order to reduce the STAR-RIS implementation costs. Approximate and asymptotic closed-form expressions for the average block error rate (BLER) and achievable rate have been derived to reveal some useful insights, such as the actuators' diversity order, coding gain, the power allocation factor, packet length, and the number of information bits. Numerical results confirm that: i) the considered system achieves better BLER balance among the actuators than classical RIS-based short-packet NOMA systems and higher achievable sum rate than RIS-based short-packet orthogonal multiple access ones; ii) the STAR-RIS with discrete phase shift design using 3-bit quantization achieves near-optimal performance with the continuous phase shift; iii) there is a trade-off between using bit quantizer and the total number of STAR-RIS elements; and iv) the power allocation strategy provides better average sum rate improvement than block-length increasing strategy.