Efficient Resource Management for NOMA-Enabled UAV Communications in 6G IRS-Assisted Vehicular Networks

Intelligent reconfigurable surfaces (IRS) have emerged as a promising technology to enhance wireless communications by dynamically controlling the propagation environment. Despite their potential, practical challenges such as effective integration with existing systems and efficient optimization remain critical. This paper investigates the sum capacity enhancement of NOMA-enabled uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) communications in vehicular networks assisted IRS. In urban environments where direct links from UAV to vehicles are often obstructed by buildings or other obstacles, the IRS plays a critical role in improving signal quality by reflecting signals toward vehicles. We consider a downlink NOMA transmission scenario, where the UAV serves multiple ground vehicles, and signals are delivered through both direct and IRS-assisted links. A joint optimization problem is formulated to maximize the sum capacity by simultaneously optimizing UAV power allocation and IRS passive beamforming while ensuring a minimum signal-to-interference plus noise ratio requirement for each vehicle. To address the non-convex nature and reduce the complexity of the optimization, we first transform the original problem using the first-order Taylor expansion method. Then, we employ a two-step solution based on the fixed-point iteration method for passive beamforming at the IRS and standard convex optimization for UAV power allocation. The proposed solution is compared with a benchmark scheme with direct UAV-to-vehicle communication without IRS assistance. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed framework converges quickly and significantly outperforms the benchmarks in terms of system capacity.