Outage Performance of RIS-Assisted AmBC-NOMA Cooperative V2I Communications

Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication facilitates seamless interaction between vehicles and the surrounding infrastructure. Recently, there has been a notable surge in research interest in ambient backscatter communications (AmBC), primarily due to its ability to enable battery-free communication. Concurrently, reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RISs) have garnered attention as a promising technology, particularly for the advancement of cellular systems beyond 5G. Additionally, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) assumes a pivotal role in enhancing spectrum utilization. This paper proposes a new RIS-enhanced NOMA-AmBC system where all channels are characterized by Nakagami-m fading and with the main objective of assessing the performance of such system. To this end, new closed-form expressions for the outage probabilities (OPs) were derived under the practical assumption of imperfect successive interference cancellation (SIC). In addition, to gain a deep insight into the system’s performance, we derived asymptotic, upper-bound, and lower-bound expressions for the OPs. Furthermore, we proposed a power allocation optimization problem to achieve an outage-optimal performance. To validate the analytical results, we conducted extensive investigations using Monte Carlo simulations, which indicates a high degree of consistency. Moreover, our results underscore the remarkable performance improvements achieved by the RIS-assisted AmBC-NOMA system when compared to both the traditional benchmark AmBC-NOMA system and the RIS-assisted orthogonal multiple access (AmBCOMA) counterparts.