Outage Analysis of NOMA-Enabled Backscatter Communications With Intelligent Reflecting Surfaces

Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) has emerged as a potential technology to achieve smart wireless communications and high energy efficiency. On the other hand, nonorthogonal multiple access (NOMA)-enabled backscatter communications have shown a great potential in large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) networks. In this article, we consider a downlink IRS-assisted backscatter communication with NOMA. We further consider a two-user scenario with channel disparity from the base station. We first derive the probability density function of the sum of the modulus of reflected channels, where each channel follows the Rayleigh distribution with dissimilar variances. The respective and generalized closed-form outage probability expressions are derived for the considered scenario. Simulation results validate the accuracy of the analytical outage probability expressions. We demonstrate that the far user can achieve a superior performance with the increase of reflecting elements or the reflection coefficients.