Work

A Practical Implementation of mmWave NOMA With IRS-Aided Indoor Coverage Extension

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: This work presents a practical implementation that integrates three emerging wireless technologies: mmWave communications to access a broadband underutilized spectrum, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) as the multiple access strategy, and intelligent reflective surfaces (IRS) as the relaying strategy. The goal is to provide multiuser mmWave indoor coverage in a specific indoor setting. Coverage in the mmWave band, often affected by blind spots, is extended by the ad-hoc design and deployment of a fully passive IRS that requires no power supply. Contrary to the use of a Reconfigurable Intelligent Surface (RIS), this solution lacks the dynamic reconfigurability of the relay but offers a low-cost, easy-to-deploy alternative with zero power consumption to provide coverage tailored to the architecture of the scenario. The integration with power-domain NOMA provides increased spectral efficiency by multiplexing two users in the same frequency, time and code slot. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first mmWave NOMA implementation and the first prototype that includes both NOMA and IRS. The radio frequency (RF) design ensures a bandwidth of 400 MHz centered at 24.45 GHz, and the communication link is evaluated through over-the-air (OTA) measurements of channel power, error vector magnitude (EVM) and symbol error rate (SER), considering different user positions and superposition coding strategies.

Source: IEEE Transactions on Communications

DOI: 10.1109/tcomm.2025.3610214