IRS-Aided Uplink Transmission Scheme in Integrated Satellite-Terrestrial Networks

This paper proposes an intelligent reflecting surface (IRS)-aided uplink transmission scheme to expand the wireless coverage and improve spectral efficiency for an integrated satellite-terrestrial network (ISTN). Here, multiple earth stations communicate with the satellite via non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) technology, while multiple direct users and blockage users access the cellular network through space division multiple access and IRS-aided NOMA technology, respectively. In particular, we first aim at maximizing the ergodic sum rate of the ISTN subject to the quality-of-service requirements and transmit power budgets of all users, yielding a constrained optimization problem. Then, based on the assumption that only the statistical channel state information (CSI) is available, we propose a two-layer alternating algorithm to solve the non-convex original problem. The algorithm combines successive convex approximation with $S$ -procedure approach to calculate the phase shifts of IRS and transmit powers of all users in the first layer, and uses Charnes-Cooper method with semi-definite programming to calculate beamforming vectors at the BS in the second layer. Furthermore, with the help of the zero-forcing beamforming principle, we propose a low-complexity algorithm to solve the problem that can reduce the computational load effectively. Finally, simulation results demonstrate that our proposed algorithms can obtain a higher ergodic sum rate than the benchmarks.