Analysis of Uplink IRS-Assisted NOMA under Nakagami-m Fading via Moments Matching

This letter investigates the uplink outage performance of intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-assisted non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA). We consider the general case where all users have both direct and reflection links, and all links undergo Nakagami-m fading. We approximate the received powers of the NOMA users as Gamma random variables via moments matching. This allows for tractable expressions of the outage under interference cancellation (IC), while being flexible in modeling various propagation environments. Our analysis shows that under certain conditions, the presence of an IRS might degrade the performance of users that have dominant line-of-sight (LOS) to the base station (BS), while users dominated by non-line-of-sight (NLOS) will always benefit from it.