arXiv · 2609.10468
HAPS-RIS or HAPS-Relay: Which Outperforms Under Impairments with NOMA in 6G NTN?
Abstract
This paper investigates the performance of high-altitude platform station (HAPS)-assisted communication systems employing either reconfigurable intelligent surfaces (RIS) or relay stations (RS) under non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) scheme. Practical system impairments, including hardware impairments (HWI) and imperfect channel state information (CSI), are explicitly considered. The results show that HAPS-RIS outperforms HAPS-RS in terms of both sum-rate and energy efficiency under non-ideal conditions due to its passive nature, which avoids noise amplification. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that RIS element allocation and user spatial distribution significantly impact NOMA performance, where increased user separation and proper allocation enhance channel disparity and improve system efficiency. Despite its higher sensitivity to imperfect CSI, HAPS-RIS can effectively compensate for performance degradation through large-scale RIS element deployment, maintaining a performance advantage over half-duplex RS-based systems. These insights provide useful design guidelines for impairment-aware HAPS-assisted 6G communication systems.
Explore related subjects
Keep this discovery
Bilal Karaman, Faicel Khennoufa, Ilhan Basturk, Metin Ozturk, Ferdi Kara, Sezai Taskin, Halim Yanikomeroglu. 2026-09-09. HAPS-RIS or HAPS-Relay: Which Outperforms Under Impairments with NOMA in 6G NTN?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10468
Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.