STAR-RIS-Aided UAV Communication for Next Generation Multiple Access With Resource Allocation

Evolutionary non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) has emerged as a potential candidate for next-generation multiple access (NGMA). The signal processing research combined with NOMA and cutting-edge 6G technology reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is attractive, but their compatibility is also a challenging research issue. In this paper, a full-coverage simultaneously transmitting and reflecting (STAR) RIS-enabled uplink NOMA communication model for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is proposed to attain the joint design of computing and communication resources allocation. The aim of this work is to boost the sum-rate to the utmost degree while minimizing the system computing offloading latency. On the one hand, we jointly explore the computing offloading and NOMA uplink successive interference cancellation (SIC) decoding optimization problem in STAR-RIS assisted uplink signal propagation with energy splitting (ES) mode, solving for the computational offloading task size and decoding order. Alternatively, the beamforming and phase-shift of transmitting and reflecting is decoupled and optimized by hybrid whale-bat optimization algorithm (WBOA) and coordinate descent method (CDM), which gives a solution to minimize offloading latency. It is verified that the joint devised scheme may greatly contribute to the computing offloading capability and communication performance of the system.