IRS-Assisted Downlink and Uplink NOMA in Wireless Powered Communication Networks

This paper studies the integration of the newly-emerged intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) technology into non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-based wireless powered communication networks (WPCNs). We consider two WPCNs which communicate with a common hybrid access point (HAP), where there exists two types of devices in each WPCN, namely information receiving device (IRD) and harvest-then-transmit device (HTTD). Downlink communication from the HAP to IRDs, downlink energy transfer (ET) from the HAP to HTTDs, and uplink information transmission (IT) from the HTTDs to the HAP are assisted by two IRSs, one in each WPCN. Under this setup, we propose efficient algorithms to optimize reflection coefficients, beamforming vectors, and resource allocation for the sake of uplink sum-rate maximization, taking into account the minimum rate requirement at the IRDs. Numerical results show the considerable performance gain of the proposed NOMA-based scheme as compared to the conventional orthogonal multiple access (OMA)-based counterpart.