Enhancing uplink NOMA cooperative networks with RIS-UAV assistance in Nakagami-m fading channels

Reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) emerges as a novel communication technology for the 6G networks, boasting advantages such as low cost, high energy efficiency, and wide coverage. To enhance spectrum utilization and ensure signal transmission stability in complex communication scenarios, this paper presents an uplink cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmission network assisted by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) equipped with RIS. Firstly, a direct link is established between near users and the base station, while a decode-and-forward (DF) relay R and RIS-UAV are deployed between far users and the base station to achieve reliable transmission in a dynamic environment through joint NOMA. Furthermore, an incremental cooperative NOMA scheme is proposed for the uplink transmission, where the relay R remains silent if the RIS-UAV successfully transmits the signal of distant users; if the RIS-UAV fails to transmit the signal to the base station, the relay R is activated to complete the communication between distant users and the base station. Then, the base station employs a selection combining (SC) scheme to process the received signals. Finally, exact expressions of the outage probability under various power allocation strategies are derived. The research results indicate that the outage performance improves with an increase in the number of RIS reflection elements. Moreover, the presence of RIS-UAV can reduce the impact of power allocation strategies on the performance of the uplink NOMA network compared to networks without RIS-UAV.